If you live in the Euro zone or have to represent the Euro Symbol in your Excel work you may notice that it is not always displayed as being available on your keyboard. Depending on your keyboard it may be a little tricky to find actually where and how you can type the symbol into your Excel worksheet.

First of all we need to how to find out where your symbol is stored and how to get access to it. A typical computer keyboard contains approximately 94 different letters, numbers and other symbols such as punctuation marks. Once you then look at different fonts there are many other symbols at your disposal within them.

For example in the Arial font there are over 200 differing symbols such as the copyright mark, the British Pound and the Euro Currency symbol. These symbols however cannot be accessed by typing just a single key on a typical keyboard. All characters are stored internally by the computer by being assigned a standard code number. For example the capital letter A is stored with a code of 65. So, in order to use the special symbols such as the Euro you will need to know the code that it is assigned to.

Once you know the code- you can access the symbol and even assign it a shortcut key for easy access in the future.

So how do you find a list of the codes in the first place?.

You can quickly create a simple list of symbols on an Excel worksheet by entering the following formula in cell A1, and then copying the formula down through row 255:

=CHAR(ROW())

This will display in each cell the character whose code number is that cell’s row number. For example, the Euro Currency symbol will appear in cell A128, which indicates that its code number is 128.

You can also change the font of the column to see what characters are supplied by various fonts. So we now know the code, so all we need to do is enter that character any time by holding down the ALT key, and typing the 4-digit code number on the numeric keypad (the keys on the far right of your keyboard — do not use the “normal” number keys above the letter keys). So we know it is 128 for the Euro symbol.

It all sounds a bit of a long winded way to access symbols, but once you know the formula to display what is available, they are easy to find.