Enter special characters in Excel

With the standard computer keyboard, you can enter about 94 different types of characters, including letters, numbers, and other functional symbols. However, in practice, we will use many other characters, which cannot be directly entered through the standard US keyboard, for example, there are about 200 different characters in the Standard font Arial, including the pound, euro, and copyright. This document describes how to enter these special characters in Excel.

 

Enter characters on the keyboard

If you know the number of each character, you can enter these special characters directly on the keyboard by pressing the Alt key, then enter four numbers in the keypad (note the number keys on the keypad instead of those on the keypad ). The numbers of the characters are usually only three digits, but we must enter a leading number of 0. For example, if the pound character number is 163, press the Alt key and enter 0163 on the keyboard to directly enter the pound character in the current cell of Excel. The following table compares some common special characters with numbers.

Euro	€	0128
Ellipsis	...	0133
Dagger	Bytes †	0134
Double dagger	Bytes ‡	0135
Bullet	•	0149
Trademark		0153
Cents	Bytes	0162
Pounds	£.	0163
Yen	¥	0165
Copyright		0169
Registered		0174
Plus/minus	±	0177
Paragraph	Bytes ¶	0182
Degree	°	0176

 

Create a symbol list

Unless you often use special characters, it is difficult to remember the numbers corresponding to these symbols. There is a simple way to display the numeric numbers corresponding to the characters in Excel. Enter the following line in cell A1 of the Excel worksheet.CodeThen, use the fill handle to copy cell A1 down to row 255th. Excel will automatically create a quick symbol list for you.

= Char (row ())

Each cell from A1 to a255 displays a character in the current font. The number of the character is the row number of the cell. For example, if the number of the euro symbol is 128, it is displayed in cell a128. Change the font of the current Excel document and you will find that the characters in the cell change.

 

Use Symbols in Formulas

If you need to use special characters in the formula of the Excel worksheet, use the char function. For example, if you want to insert copyright information into an Excel cell, you can use the following line of code:

= Char (169) & "Copyright, 2009 ."

The Char (169) function returns the character corresponding to the number 169, which is the copyright symbol. The code function is the opposite of the char function. It is used to return the number corresponding to the specified symbol. For example, the following code returns the digit 65 corresponding to uppercase letter:

= Code ("")

In VBA programming, two functions with the same function as char and code are CHR and ASC respectively. The following code is used to display the copyright information in the prompt box:

Msgbox CHR (169) & "Copyright, 2009 ."

 

Add an external symbol plug-in for ExcelProgram

Here is an example of an Excel external program implemented using VBA. You can add its VBA code in your own Excel document to insert special characters. Symbolizer is placed as an external program in the add-ins menu of Excel. When you click it, a dialog box is displayed, as shown in. Select a character and click Copy to copy it to the clipboard of windows. Click put to insert the selected character into the current active cell, click the append button to append the selected characters to the current active cell. By default, the dialog box lists all the 255 characters in the current font. If you only want to use common characters, click the quick button to filter out frequently used characters, such as currency symbols, copyright and trademark symbols.

Download symbolizer

Original article address