Excel Function: LOWER

Purpose

The LOWER function transforms all upper-case characters in a text value to lower case. Its output is always a value of type text. If it operates on a value stored by Excel as a number, like a date, then the number underpinning that value is converted to text and becomes the LOWER function’s output.

Invocations of the LOWER function take the form:

LOWER(text)

Arguments

Argument	Argument type	Description
text	Mandatory	A value whose upper case characters will be transformed to lower case.

Related Functions

Function	Example	Purpose

Examples

Example	Formula	Result	Description
1	`=LOWER("abc-def")`	`abc-def`	Apply the LOWER function to lower-case text. Punctuation marks are unaffected by LOWER. Lower case letters are unaffected by LOWER. Because of this, the value passed to the text argument and the result are equal.
2	`=LOWER("aBc-dEf")`	`abc-def`	Apply the LOWER function to mixed-case text. Punctuation marks are unaffected by LOWER. Upper case letters are transformed into lower case letters by LOWER.
3	`=LOWER(DATE(2023,8,7))`	`45145`	Apply the LOWER function to a date value. Excel represents 7th August, 2023 with the number 45145. It is transformed into the text value “45145”. Since there are no lower case numbers, the result is the text “45145”.
4	`=LOWER("Ѐ Å 漢")`	`ѐ å 漢`	Apply the LOWER function to text containing characters which have no lower-case version. Both “Ѐ” and “Å” have lower-case versions. They appear in the result. “漢” has no lower-case version and appears in the result, unchanged.