Capitalization of every word in Excel or Word

Hello:

Someone just turned an excel file into our magazine production department.
It has over 12,000 rows of data with each entry having 3 columns.
The data in each column is either a person or horse’s name so they read as “john smith” or “doc o lena.”
All of the names need to have the first letter capped.
I know I can cap all text coming into InDesign for use in our magazine and that’s not a bad fix in a pinch. 100% of the human names have to be fixed to John Smith, and over 99% of the horse ones Would run as Doc O Lena, but a few might need to be Doc o Lena. I’d rather not have to make those minor corrections in InDesign and then be forced to export the text out for use in other places. I know down the road I will have to push this data to a website so I’d hate to go through this again.

So, to sum it up, I’d love to cap the first letter of each word in excel and let it be proofed their by our editorial staff for those 1% of the horse names that didn’t need it.

Thanks in advance.

-curtis

Hi Curtis,

look at this thread. One of the shortest ways in MS Word is:

tell application "Microsoft Word" to set content of text object of active document to my titlecase(content of text object of active document)

on titlecase(txt)
	return do shell script "python -c \"import sys; print unicode(sys.argv[1], 'utf8').title().encode('utf8')\" " & quoted form of txt
end titlecase

If it’s in Excel, you can also create a new column and assign the PROPER function to it. (enter “=PROPER()” in the formula bar and paste down the row).

Takes two seconds and will automatically update if necessary.

-N

Thanks.
Worked like a charm.
Took about 2 minutes to export to word, run the script, and import back into excel aftering converting the text in 4800 fields. My staff in InDesign thank you.
-curtis