New Text Function: PROPER ( )

[Adam_Parker]

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

EXAMPLE:

PROPER ( “1232 DEER VALLLEY AVE” ) 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).

I’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!

[George_Efstathi]

I believe this is called “Title case” as per the following: Capitalisation Rules.

I also agree this would be handy to have.

[Matt_Sayward]

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]

(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]

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. I’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]

This is such a basic spreadsheet function I can’t see why Airtable wouldn’t have it. Hope they can implement soon.

[Andrew_Enright]

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

[George_Copelan1]

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]

George_Copeland:

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

Um, yeah, of course.

Field Tweaker - Script Block for In-place Transformations Show and tell

After importing data, it’s not uncommon to want to clean up and normalize data values, especially text fields that may have all types of inconsistencies. Unfortunately, Airtable doesn’t support in-place transformations where formulas can be applied to modify the field contents of all cells. This is where the Field Tweaker script block can help. It supports in-place text transformations including upper case, lower case, and title case modifications across all records for select fields. The scrip…

[Scott_Heliker]

Yes… I use this in integromat. They called id startCase

[dk82734]

Can we please get support for this function?