Change text

Before grouping, counting, or exporting text data, it's helpful to clean and standardize it. One row might say “sweden”, another “Sweden”, and another “SWEDEN” — all meaning the same thing, but treated as different values. We often clean text to prepare for structured work like pivot tables or visualizations.

In this section, we’ll learn how to change the case of text, remove unwanted spaces, and simplify messy entries.

Make text lowercase, uppercase, or title case

Excel

In Excel, you use =LOWER(), =UPPER(), or =PROPER() to standardize how words are written.

t0 Prompt

Make all country names lowercase

Capitalize every word in the seller column

Change buyer names to uppercase

Code

The python code looks as follows:

transactions["Buyer Country"] = transactions["Buyer Country"].str.lower()
transactions["Seller"] = transactions["Seller"].str.title()
transactions

Remove extra spaces

Excel

In Excel, you use =TRIM() to remove extra spaces before, after, or between words.

t0 Prompt

Clean up spacing in the seller column

Remove leading and trailing spaces

Trim extra spaces from all text entries in column X

Code

The python code looks as follows:

transactions["Seller"] = transactions["Seller"].str.strip()
transactions

Replace characters or punctuation

Excel

In Excel, you use =SUBSTITUTE() or =REPLACE() to clean or simplify characters in text.

t0 Prompt

Remove dots from the suffix column

Replace slashes with hyphens

Clean special characters from names

Code

The python code looks as follows:

transactions["Seller"] = transactions["Seller"].str.replace(".", "", regex=False)
transactions