Alt Codes in office

adolf hamster · 29 Jan 2019 at 09:24

so i have need of quicker and easier ways to insert special characters than trawling through office's character map, specifically greek and mathematical symbols

so i have a list of alt-codes in my notebook for stuff i might want to need, mostly in the range of 220-250

however, this isn't consistent, on my work laptop and my home laptop (both windows 10) this works just fine, however my main rig it doesn't (windows 8.1)

now they're all running the same version of office 365, only difference as far as i can tell is the operating system version, which is kind of annoying.

anyone any idea's as to what's up? or better ways of doing these kinds of symbols?

h4rm0ny · 29 Jan 2019 at 10:45

I have a number of Alt-codes memorised and can type them just by holding down Alt and typing them on the numeric keypad. E.g. ½. For me that works in Word as well as in a browser window. I'm on Windows 10 Pro. If I do a maths symbol such a ±, ("241"), again that still works fine in Word and Edge and even Notepad. So I'm afraid it looks like it might be the OS version.

I did find this which suggests maybe Numlock can be an issue:
http://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/windows/codealt/

Also a discussion on the problem which hints that maybe it's again something to do with how the numeric key pad is implemented. I.e if they implemented it like the numbers were regularly the same as the top row of the keyboard. Sounds weird but you could try with the onscreen keyboard in Windows 8.1 to see what happens, just to try and diagnose this. If it works with that, there might be hardware options that will help. I *think* that has a numeric keypad as one of it's options?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...indows-8/76aa37fc-c554-4cdc-8864-46736cd6c864

adolf hamster · 29 Jan 2019 at 10:55

so i tried it with the on-screen keyboard with the same results, ALT 224 which should give me a greek lowercase alpha instead gives me Ó (guess it's worth noting that obviously this phenominon exists in other programs like opera)

however ALT 0177 still gives me ± which is correct on all systems, although adding an 0 to the code for the greek stuff (eg ALT 0224 giving à) doesn't work

also tried with numlock on and off which didn't make a difference, keyboard wise the 2 windows 10 pc's are using generic keyboards with numpads and the main rig is using a corsair k95 rgb which i'd assume has proper numpad implementation

h4rm0ny · 29 Jan 2019 at 13:25

Óô±

adolf hamster said:
so i tried it with the on-screen keyboard with the same results, ALT 224 which should give me a greek lowercase alpha instead gives me Ó (guess it's worth noting that obviously this phenominon exists in other programs like opera)

however ALT 0177 still gives me ± which is correct on all systems, although adding an 0 to the code for the greek stuff (eg ALT 0224 giving à) doesn't work

also tried with numlock on and off which didn't make a difference, keyboard wise the 2 windows 10 pc's are using generic keyboards with numpads and the main rig is using a corsair k95 rgb which i'd assume has proper numpad implementation

Typing into the browser on Windows 10, using the Numpad on my keyboard I get:
224 = Ó
0177 = ±
0224 = à

I don't use Alt-codes that much for mathematical symbols. It's usually foreign alphabets with me. I have run into weird cases where an Alt-Code I have looked up online has produced a different output that I'm told. I think the issue is that they're not always using the Unicode code for historical reasons / backwards compatibility. Reading through Wikipedia on the subject, there appears to be a way to configure which it uses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code

Given you're focused on mathematical symbols there's probably a high chance that they have overlapping, pre-existing codes from older IBM days where Alt-Codes come from.

adolf hamster · 29 Jan 2019 at 14:02

hmmm, it's a strange one for sure.

i did try the registry tweak for inputting unicode but that didn't work either.

gotta be an easier way to do this.......

h4rm0ny · 30 Jan 2019 at 15:09

adolf hamster said:
hmmm, it's a strange one for sure.

i did try the registry tweak for inputting unicode but that didn't work either.

gotta be an easier way to do this.......

I'll take a crack at it when I have some free time. Maybe I can figure out what's going on. I run into it myself from time to time.

adolf hamster · 30 Jan 2019 at 15:17

yeah, one of the lads in the office just suggested buying a keyboard from greece lol.

on me work laptop now and it's defo an os thing as:
alt 224 gives me α
alt 0224 gives me à

so the 0 codes work fine regardless, just the others that aren't so useful

might have to try and find the 0 codes for the symbols i want

h4rm0ny · 30 Jan 2019 at 22:00

adolf hamster said:
might have to try and find the 0 codes for the symbols i want

That's what I was going to suggest. I think basically MS had to keep the historical codes for backwards-compatibility. Or at least felt they had to. But the Unicode ones are fine. You might just want to spend 10-15 minutes going through your favourite symbols on this site and noting down the decimal numbers:

https://unicodelookup.com/

All the ones I just tried (admittedly two) entered correctly in Windows by just doing 0nnn where nnn is the number from the decimal column in the search results table.

EDIT: Note you can paste a whole string of symbols in to that and it will give you rows for each individual symbol. So if you have them all together in some format, you're sorted.

adolf hamster · 31 Jan 2019 at 10:44

yeah, i did a run through on excel but it seems like there's an issue with the way they're set up.

0945 in excel's unichar gives a lowercase alpha, but typing that as an alt code doesn't work.

strange thing is the lower numbers (eg 010) work just fine if you compare excels unichar output with what the same value gives as an alt code.