As a consultant, I'm often asked some pretty bizarre questions. One that I frequently hear is 'How do I type on my Mac?' ![]() Excel is not an easy program in use and it is not strange that people often need to get the excel typing help. Such typing help can get from different sources. Such typing help can get from different sources. For a mac, if you're in Microsoft word, just hit Option+J and that should produce the ∆ symbol. If you prefer the lower case delta, just scroll through the list until you find the symbol you want. A good example of this is people who want to type fractions that look like this -- ½ -- rather than like 1/2, or plop a character like an umbrella -- ☂ -- or a skull and crossbones -- ☠ -- in the middle of a sentence. It's actually quite easy to do this, although finding these uncommon characters isn't something that's readily apparent, especially to new Mac users. Follow along as I show you how to insert or type characters that won't be found on your keyboard. Scrolling through the list of different categories of characters on the left side of the viewer, you can choose from math, arrows, different types of parentheses, currency symbols, crosses, digits, Greek letters, ornamental punctuation, and even Braille patterns. If I click on the Miscellaneous category as seen above, a large group of symbols appears. In the screenshot above, I've chosen the 'White Left Pointing Index' image. I can simply insert that character at my current insertion point in a document by clicking the insert button. All of those bizarre symbols in the image at the top of this Mac 101 post were just inserted into a Pages document in this manner. Going through the process of inserting a symbol is fine if you're only going to be typing it once, but what if you need to re-use a specific character many times in a document? You can either do a copy and paste for each occurrence, or you can type the character using a unique hexadecimal code that is assigned to each character. To determine what that code is for any character, just click on the character in the viewer, then 'hover' your cursor above it until a yellow tooltip appears near it as in the screenshot above). Make a note of the code number for the character; for the pointing finger, it's 261C. To type the special characters, go back to the Input menu in the menu bar and select 'Unicode Hex Input.' Press and hold the Option key on your keyboard, and then type the hexadecimal code. In this case, you'd type Option-261C to make the left pointing index finger magically appear in your document. You can also use the popular application for Mac OS X ($34.95 from Smile Software) to create shortcut snippets that you can type to display a character. The company uses an example on their website of typing eeuro to enter a Euro symbol (€) -- you could set up a snippet named 'lfinger' to enter the left pointing index finger symbol without every needing to bring up the Input menu or Character Viewer. This tip is not only fun, but extremely useful in those cases where you want to use a specific non-standard character or symbol to call attention to something in a document. Be sure to visit our earlier articles for other time-saving tips. With, there are several ways to make the degree symbol: Type Degree symbol • One can type Alt+ 2 4 8 or Alt+ 0 1 7 6 Note: “0176” is different from “176”; + 1 7 6 produces the light shade (░) character. Note: The NumLock must be set first; on full size keyboards, the numeric must be used; on laptops without a numerical keypad, the virtual numeric keypad must be used (often requiring that the Fn key be held down as the numeric sequence is typed). • The US-International English keyboard layout creates the degree symbol with AltGr+ ⇧ Shift+; Type Degree symbol In Microsoft Office, there is often also an Insert menu with an Insert Symbol or Symbol command that brings up a graphical palette of symbols to insert, including the degree symbol. Type Degree symbol In, the degree symbol is accessed by pressing and holding 0 and dragging your finger to the degree symbol. Action movie for mac.
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