Smart Case

The Case menu in the Text and Number group holds five commands that normalise letter case. They rewrite the cells in place, so you do not need the helper column that Excel's UPPER / LOWER / PROPER functions force on you.

It is aimed at construction paperwork: the work-description column of a bill of quantities, item names in an acceptance record, staff lists — anywhere data arrives from several people and the capitalisation is all over the place.

Commands in this group

Command	What it does
Sentence case	Lowercases everything, then capitalises the first letter of each sentence; also tidies extra spaces
UPPERCASE	Converts the whole selection to capitals
lowercase	Converts the whole selection to lower case
Proper Case	Capitalises the first letter of every word (Title Case)
SMART case (AI)	Sends each cell to the configured AI service to fix capitalisation in context (Ctrl+Shift+S)

The first four run entirely offline. The fifth calls the AI service configured in Preferences.

Normalising a description column

1. Save the file (or duplicate the sheet) first — these commands overwrite the cells and Ctrl+Z cannot restore the whole range.
2. Select the column. Selecting the entire column is fine: the selection is clipped to the UsedRange, so it still runs fast.
3. If the data arrived in ALL CAPS, run lowercase first to get a clean base.
4. Run the command you actually need:
   • Long sentences (work descriptions, acceptance notes) → Sentence case.
   • People, companies, short item names → Proper Case.
   • Table headings, package names → UPPERCASE.
5. Read the Excel status bar: it reports something like "Changed N/M cells". If nothing changed, a dialog explains why (all formulas, all blank, or already correct).
6. Check the acronyms that got mangled (TCVN, BTCT, LTD, UBND). If there are many, select that block and run SMART case (AI) to get them back.

To stop halfway through a large range, hold ESC; the blocks already written are kept.

Example

A description column in an acceptance record, typed without any attention to case:

Original	Proper Case	SMART case (AI)
nghiệm thu cốt thép dầm sàn theo tcvn 5574:2018	Nghiệm Thu Cốt Thép Dầm Sàn Theo Tcvn 5574:2018	Nghiệm thu cốt thép dầm sàn theo TCVN 5574:2018
nhà thầu: cty tnhh xây dựng hoàng long	Nhà Thầu: Cty Tnhh Xây Dựng Hoàng Long	Nhà thầu: Cty TNHH Xây dựng Hoàng Long
giám sát: kỹ sư nguyễn văn an	Giám Sát: Kỹ Sư Nguyễn Văn An	Giám sát: Kỹ sư Nguyễn Văn An

The middle column shows the built-in weakness of Title Case: TCVN becomes Tcvn, TNHH becomes Tnhh. The right column is the AI command, which keeps the acronyms intact.

For the record's title line, select the cell and run UPPERCASE: "Biên bản nghiệm thu công việc xây dựng" → "BIÊN BẢN NGHIỆM THU CÔNG VIỆC XÂY DỰNG".

Tips and caveats

• Formula cells are always left alone — formula results are never flattened into static values. Blank cells, numbers and dates are untouched as well.
• Both Sentence case and Proper Case start by lowercasing everything, so every acronym in the cell is destroyed. That is inherent to how they work, not a bug.
• Sentence case capitalises a letter at the start of the string or straight after the pairs . , : , ? , ! , / , - .
• SMART case (AI) needs an internet connection and a valid API key; without them the cells are left unchanged and no per-cell warning appears. Cell content is sent to an external AI service — do not use it on confidential project data.
• Large selections burn a lot of API calls and can hit rate limits; run the AI command on batches of a few dozen cells.
• A detailed log of the case commands is written to %TEMP%\DVDAddin\case.log, useful when you need to check which cells were touched.

See also

• Text Utilities — remove extra spaces, add text, superscript/subscript in the same ribbon group.
• Smart Data Cleaning — normalise case together with trim, dates, phone numbers and duplicate rows.
• Remove accents — strip Vietnamese diacritics for codes and file names.
• Encoding — bring legacy TCVN3/VNI files to Unicode before changing case.