shortcut for a scientific notation on word with mac

m-Dash - ALT-0151Ĭhances are you may not be familiar with this slightly longer version of the dash. dry ice–acetone), it also doubles-up as a minus sign.

Bose–Einstein condensate) and mixtures of chemicals (e.g. 10–20 kg) to multi-person scientific methods (e.g. Ideal for everything from numerical ranges (e.g. So-called because it’s the same length as a letter ‘n’, this is my most often-used shortcut, largely because I love a good n-dash. The symbols themselves usually look best in a serif font rather than a sans-serif font – I’ve chosen Cambria here. They also avoid the problem of your symbols changing back to the Roman letters if you later decide to change the font used in your document! These ALT codes for the Greek letters most commonly used in scientific texts will ensure that they’ll appear correctly in most common fonts. But Greek letters are now encoded in many common fonts, so you can achieve a more consistent appearance by using the following ALT codes to generate the symbol instead. Now that I’ve covered that technicality, here are my top symbols and their shortcuts: Greek lettersįor many years, the go-to method for getting Greek letters was to key the Roman letter, and then laboriously change the font to Symbol (‘a’ for alpha, ‘b’ for beta, etc.). If you’re using a keyboard that doesn’t have a numberpad, then it’s still possible but just a bit more fiddly – while holding the key marked with a coloured ‘Function’ or ‘fn’, press and release ‘Num lock’, and then use the keys that have numbers in the same colour. Most of the shortcuts I’ve listed below use the numberpad – all you need to do is to ensure ‘Num lock’ is on, hold down ‘ALT’, and then key the digits to get the symbol (or ‘glyph’ to use the correct terminology). To help you get started, I’ve selected the symbols that I think are the most useful in scientific literature. Correct use of scientific symbols is essential to make your document look professional – but do you ever wish you didn’t have to constantly scroll down through the Symbol palette looking for your chosen character? If this is a familiar frustration (and you‘re working in a full-capability app such as Word) then it’s worth trying ALT codes instead.

Shortcut for a scientific notation on word with mac