Change Characters in Excel

Among all text operations in Excel, modifying characters is one of the most common tasks. The most frequently modified are alphabetic characters.

Change the Letter Case

The primary attribute of alphabetic characters that’s commonly modified is their case. The !SEMTools add-in provides several smart ways to switch between lowercase and uppercase:

• Instantly fix the casing of place names (the add-in recognizes over 40,000 of them)
• Convert all text to uppercase or lowercase
• Capitalize the first letter of each sentence
• Capitalize the first letter of each word
• Automatically detect and correct the case of abbreviations

For more, see the article: Changing Letter Case in Excel.

Replace Diacritic Characters with Latin Equivalents

There are several common reasons why you might need to replace diacritic characters (like é or ñ) with basic Latin equivalents:

1. Domain names: Some domain systems don’t support diacritics. For example, “café.com” may not work as expected, so “cafe.com” is preferred.
2. Data consistency: When consolidating data from various sources, replacing diacritics helps standardize the text for better consistency and comparison.
3. Search engine optimization (SEO): Removing diacritics may improve your website’s visibility and indexing by search engines.

Replace “Quotation Marks” with «Guillemets»

In some cases, replacing regular quotation marks with guillemets (« ») is useful:

1. When writing in a language like French or Spanish that traditionally uses guillemets
2. For formatting books, articles, or academic content that follow specific style guidelines
3. To clearly distinguish nested quotes or dialogue levels
4. As a design or branding choice on websites or print materials
5. To maintain consistency when translating documents from a language that uses guillemets

Helpful Tips

Before replacing characters, it’s a good idea to locate them first. If you’re performing bulk replacements across large Excel ranges, running a search first can save time and system resources. Character replacement operations can be CPU-intensive and slow when applied to large datasets.

Check out the section on Finding Symbols in Excel — it can help optimize the workflow and prevent unnecessary delays.

You may also find these sections useful:

• Coming soon: How to remove unnecessary characters in Excel
• Coming soon: Extract characters by condition in Excel

This post is also available in RU.