MS Office comes packed with a big selection of type fonts all of which have specialized character sets that not available on your traditional keyboard. Some of the more common ones are the symbols for copyright, Trade Mark, Registered, Lira, as well as, mathematical symbols and music symbols. There is also a large selection of unusual ones found in the WingDings and Webdings font choices. MS Office provides a built in utility to make the insertion of these symbols easy in Word and in PowerPoint but not so easy in Excel. For Excel, you must revert to the system Character Map. Once you know where to find it, the technique is quite easy.
Word and PowerPoint
The technique for inserting symbols in Word and PowerPoint is the same. The command is found under: Insert | Symbol on the Menu Bar. There are symbols available for all the font types installed in your Word package and computer.
Many symbols have a keystroke short cut that can be used alternatively. The shortcut Key is displayed at the bottom of the Insert Symbol dialog box. For example in the above illustration, the selected symbol is called the Box Drawings Down Double Line and can be replicated by typing 2553 Alt+x. Keep in mind, however, that you must be in the same Font Type to get that symbol. Let's give it a try. Change your font type to Arial. Type 2553, hold your Alt Key down and press X. Did you get the right symbol? You should see this:
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If there isn't an assigned shortcut key, the shortcut key button allows you to custom assign one. Be careful when assigning a shortcut key that is isn't one previously assigned to a system function or macro that you may use. You can also add the symbol to the autocorrect list by clicking on the AutoCorrect button.
To Insert the Character into your document – simply select the symbol you want and click on the insert button. The Insert Symbol dialog box will remain open until you cancel.
Excel
Excel works a little bit differently. You must access your system Character Map to insert a symbol. To access it:
• Click on Start
• Point to Programs | Accessories | System Tools
• Click Character Map
Once you have the Character Map opened.
• Click on the character you want to use
• Click on the Select Button to put the character into the Characters to copy field
• Press copy – pressing copy put the character to the system paste board
• Return to Excel
• Make the cell in which you want to insert the character active (click in it)
• Click on the paste command
• Change the Font type for that cell in Excel to the Font from which you selected the character
Why not give that a try and see what happens. The key is to make sure the font selections are the same; otherwise, you will end up with a different symbol then the one you selected.
