Inserting symbols into Excel

Want to add some pizzaz to your spreadsheet? Some huzzah? Some kablam?
Are pizzaz, huzzah, and kablam actually words? I have no idea whatsoever, although they sound exciting enough.

Symbols and special characters can help to add a practical (or professional) touch to any Excel worksheet, yet a number of people are still unsure of how exactly to bring them into use. Let’s take a couple of minutes to give you more confidence when working with special characters in Excel.

First off, for those who are unsure of how to insert characters in to Excel:

1. Select the cell where you want the special character to be put.
2. On the Excel ribbon, select the Insert tab.
3. Click on the Symbol button

First you need to select the Symbol icon in the ribbon

4. Double-click on the character you want to insert.  If you wish to insert multiple characters, you can double-click for each character and they’ll be inserted together.

That bit’s pretty simple; let’s look at how we can make things a bit more clever:

1. The keyboard command for opening the insert symbol dialog box is ALT+I followed by S.

2. There are heaps of special characters in the symbol selector.  You can narrow down your options by selecting the appropriate “subset”.  For example, currency symbols, arrows, or number forms.

Selecting an appropriate character subset

3. The symbol selector is resizable!  By clicking on the bottom right-hand corner of the symbols dialog box, you can resize the box to let you see more options at once.  This saves you from having to spend so much time using the scroll bar.

4. Symbols can be used in certain formulas; for example, “=if(A1>A2, “↓”, “↑”)” means that, if cell A1 contains a value greater than cell A2, the formula will display a downward arrow.

5. Each symbol has its own unique character code assigned to it, which can help to save a great deal of time. For example, the small character ffl (see image below) has the character code ‘FB04’. If you wanted to navigate to this character, it would be as simple as clicking into the character code field in the bottom-right hand corner and entering ‘FB04’. The symbol selector navigates to the chosen character instantly, from any point within the character map. Now that’s what I call handy! This feature is especially useful if you repeatedly make use of one particular symbol in your reports and presentations.

Using a character code

6. The process of inserting symbols is laid out the same throughout any edition of Microsoft Office from 2003 onwards. This means that by following the above instructions, you can insert symbols into all of your Word, Powerpoint, AND Excel projects.

Enjoy!