The Power of Alt Codes

When I first began working with technical documents and foreign languages as part of my daily life, I fell in love with Alt Codes. I quickly memorized the core group of relevant characters and punctuation to make life easier, and moved on with things.

For those of you who don’t know what an Alt Code is, allow me to resolve the suspense: Alt Codes are a sequence of four characters entered while simultaneously holding down the Alt key (talking about the Windows OS).

Alt Codes make life much easier when you have to frequently use characters that aren’t included as part of the standard QWERTY keyboard. The Character Map in Windows is about the best you have, if it weren’t for Alt Codes, that is.

I recently came across a listing of Alt Codes at the Microsoft website, and I remembered my joy at first discovering these time savers. I decided to share their listing of Alt Codes with you here.

Handy Alt Codes

Symbol	Name	Alt-code
©	Copyright symbol	Alt+0169
®	Registered symbol	Alt+0174
™	Trademark	Alt+0153
•	List Dot	Alt+0149
§	Section symbol	Alt+0167
†	Dagger	Alt+0134
‡	Double dagger	Alt+0135
–	en-dash	Alt+0150
—	em-dash	Alt+0151
¶	Paragraph symbol (Pilcrow)	Alt+0182
¡	Upside-down exclamation mark	Alt+0161
¿	Upside-down question mark	Alt+0191
¢	Cent sign	Alt+0162
£	British Pound	Alt+0163
Є	Euro currency	Alt+0128
¥	Japanese Yen	Alt+0165