Charles Maxson

Making cents out of nothing...

Did you ever even notice that the ¢ has slipped into obscurity? Basically, the poor little symbol that went by the wayside along with the manual typewriter hasn't been seen too much lately. Maybe that's because you simply can't buy much of anything where the cent sign could even apply. No, inflation has killed the cent sign and the computer keyboard has allocated its precious space to things more important like the carat (^), the pipe (|) and its collection of slashes (/ \). Well, just because it is missing from your computer keyboard doesn't mean its too buried to use. You can use an escape sequence to reach the poor old cent sign by typing 0162 while holding down the {Alt} key. In fact you can use the “Alt +” four digit combination to reach any of the ASCII characters and this works well beyond Office too.... Here are some of my favorite:

Want an easy way to find all the character codes? Use Excel:

1. In cell A1, enter =CHAR(ROW())
2. Copy this formula from A1 all the way down to A255
3. The Row number is the character code for the symbol in the cell
4. You can then type {Alt} + “0 + the 3 digit row number anytime you want to insert that symbol quickly