A few snippets I found on scraps of paper whilst sorting out my office this week…

Shortcuts to symbols in Office applications

Many people will be familiar with typing (c) to generate a © symbol in Microsoft Office applications but you can also use (R) or (TM) for trademark symbols ® and ™. One more that’s useful to know is (e) for the European currency symbol € (at least, it’s useful if your keyboard doesn’t recognise the Euro!).

Another useful code to know is the shortcut to create the symbol used to denote “therefore”, which is ? (and doesn’t appear in any dialogs I’ve seen to insert a symbol/special character). In Office applications running on a Windows PC, it’s possible to type ALT+8756 to generate the symbol.

I’ve tried these in Word and OneNote but see no reason why it shouldn’t work in other Office applications.  Unfortunately the functionality is limited to Office rather than part of the operating system – it doesn’t seem to work in a browser, or in NotePad for example.

Converting numerical data to text in Excel, or SharePoint, or something like that…

A few months ago I was creating a SharePoint list and wanted to display a unique ID for each entry but couldn’t use calculated values in the title column to base it on the actual ID for the list item (at least not when provisioning via the GUI). I can’t remember the exact circumstances but, looking back at my notes it appears I used the following formula in Excel to create a text version of a numerical cell:

=TEXT(A1,"0000")

I probably then uploaded that to SharePoint as a list and messed around with the columns displayed in a particular view… although it’s all a bit vague now. I no longer have access to the list I was working on, but it might jog my memory if I have to do something similar again…