---
title: "Changing the Look of a Text String | Airtable Support"
slug: "changing-the-look-of-a-text-string"
description: "This article covers a few ways that you can change the look of the text string using the LOWER UPPER TRIM  functions in Airtable."
updated: 2025-10-24T17:29:29Z
published: 2025-10-24T17:29:29Z
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://support.airtable.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Changing text string appearances in Airtable

| **Plan availability** | All plan types |
| --- | --- |
| **Permissions** | - **Owner** /**Creator** - Have access to all field configuration options. Additionally everything editors, commenters, or read-only users can do. - **Editor** - Can sort by, filter by, group by, or hide the field within a view. - **Commenter** / **Read-only** - Copy a field's URL |
| **Platform(s)** | Web/Browser, Mac app, and Windows app |

This content covers a few ways to change the look of the text string using the `LOWER`, `UPPER`, and `TRIM` functions.

## LOWER() and UPPER()

The `LOWER()` function takes a text string and makes all the characters lowercase, while the `UPPER()` function changes all characters in a string of text to uppercase. For example:

- `LOWER("The dog is a Good Boy")` produces: `the dog is a good boy`
- Alternatively, `UPPER("The dog is a good boy")` produces: `THE DOG IS A GOOD BOY`

In practice, your formula will be `LOWER({A field containing text strings})` or `UPPER({A field containing text strings})` and the formula will modify the text from the field you input in the formula to be all lowercase or uppercase.

## TRIM()

The `TRIM()` function serves a singular purpose: to remove blank space from the beginning and/or end of a string. Let's see what that looks like in action: `TRIM(" Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. ")` results in `"Lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit."` as an output.

The function works similarly with a field as an input:

`TRIM ({Text Field}) `

The results will include the contents of the text field in each record without blank spaces at the beginning and end.

Combined with other functions, `TRIM()` can help you accomplish more. For example, if you want a character count for a text field but don't want to count blank spaces at the beginning and/or end, then you can use the `LEN()` function, [which determines string length](https://support.airtable.com/docs/extracting-text-from-a-field#using-len-in-airtable), alongside the `TRIM()` function like so:

`LEN(TRIM({Text Field}))`

Note that when using the `TRIM()` function any blank spaces outside of the beginning or end of the string will not be removed. If you wanted to remove all of the blank spaces from a string, then another formula would work better in this instance. For instance, something like:

`SUBSTITUTE({Name}," ","")`

This is helpful if you need to remove blank spaces when creating username variants of a person's full name, make text more URL-friendly, remove spaces from a long number so you can work with it as a number (rather than text), or any other situation where you need to get rid of spaces.