a coworker came to me today asking how to do this. at first i told her i didn’t think it was possible, then felt bad for saying that, not even bothering to check, did a simple google and figured it out. this is the resultant email i sent to my group, as they work with excel docs a lot:

Hey. (my coworker) came to me with a question. She had an Excel spreadsheet where everything had been entered in all caps, but needed it capitalized regularly. There’s a very quick way to do that, as explained in this web page
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/ChangingCase.aspx

Basically, create a new column. Click in the adjoining cell, type “=proper”, then click in the adjoining cell which contains the text you want converted, then hit Enter. This creates a relative reference, so if you’ve got, say, 500 rows, now you just have to copy and paste that formula by dragging it all the way down the column, and you’ll create an entirely new column, where all the text in the adjoining column has been converted to Proper Case, rather than ALL CAPS.

Now, if you want to export this to Word for, for example, a mail merge, you’re going to need to convert that new column to values, rather than formulas. Just create a new column right next to it, copy your Proper Case Column, then Paste Special: Value, into the new column, and voila, you now have text that can be copied easily into Word.

i found chris pearson’s page thru this forum link, and i’m not sure why people in the forum thread were making such a big deal of this, cuz it’s really simple to do. i may be missing something, however. by the way, chris pearson’s website is very helpful, i’ve used it many, many times over the years to do geeky, helpful things with excel.