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New Text Function: PROPER ( )

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Adam_Parker
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Similar to UPPER( ) and LOWER( ), PROPER( ) would take a text string as an argument, and convert it to โ€œProper Caseโ€, where the first letter of every work is upper-case, and subsequent letters in the word are lower-case.

EXAMPLE:

PROPER ( โ€œ1232 DEER VALLLEY AVEโ€ ) would return: 1232 Deer Valley Ave

USE CASE: I use AirTable in my real-estate business, where I hire virtual-assistants to enter public property data scraped from county websites (which often stores data in upper-case). That address data is used to for mail-merge to marketing letters, but unless I take abother step to convert the data to Capital case, the merged data appears ALL UPPERCASE, which makes the letter seem auto-generated.

To solve this, my workflow includes an export from AirTable out to a .csv file, then into Excel where I run a macro that converts to Proper Case, and then is imported back into AirTable, then out to our document merge partner (WebMerge).

Iโ€™d love to eliminate that last, fussy part of the workflow where I export out just to convert the text. If I have a PROPER ( ) function as described, it would greatly simplify my AirTable/WebMerge workflow.

Thanks!

32 Comments
George_Efstathi
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I believe this is called โ€œTitle caseโ€ as per the following: Capitalisation Rules.

I also agree this would be handy to have.

Matt_Sayward
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

You could hack around this in the meantime by converting to lower case, and then nesting around that substitute functions to turn letters with a preceding space into capital. i.e. " a" into " A", " b" to " B" and so on.

Matt_Sayward
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

(This would only work on addresses that had a number at the start to give you the initial trailing space without being affected though)

W_Vann_Hall
13 - Mars
13 - Mars

For future searchers, a link to a slightly more full-featured implementation of what @Matt_Sayward described above can be found in this reply to this post. Iโ€™ve added proper name formatting functionality to the name parsing and extraction routines I demonstrated earlier and released the combined (but not integrated) system as version 3.0 of my Name Demo base.

Murilo_Rodrigue
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

This is such a basic spreadsheet function I canโ€™t see why Airtable wouldnโ€™t have it. Hope they can implement soon.

Andrew_Enright
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

In addition to title case, weโ€™d love to see sentence case, with initial-cap at the head of a string terminated by a period.

George_Copelan1
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Please! Please! Please! :slightly_smiling_face:

Is there anyway to do this through Javascript using the new blocks in the meantime?

Happy Friday!

Bill_French
17 - Neptune
17 - Neptune

Um, yeah, of course.

Scott_Heliker
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Yesโ€ฆ I use this in integromat. They called id startCase

dk82734
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Can we please get support for this function?