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Is there a search for symbols feature?

Anonymous
2011-08-13T15:45:18+00:00

This issue has been bugging me for years. I often find it takes an annoyingly long time to find a symbol that I want to insert in a document. I generally know the name of a symbol I want to insert but can't seem to find a way to search for symbols. For example, I would like to type 'degree' in a search box and be presented with the degree symbol (together with any other symbol that contains 'degree' in its name). It has always seemed to me that this should be such a blindingly obvious feature to have in Office avoiding the need of having to trawl through a big grid of symbols to find the one I want.

Am I missing something? Does this feature already exist?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-08-13T19:27:13+00:00

    To answer my own question - yes I was missing something.

    If Windows character map is used to insert symbols (instead of the symbol dialog box built into MS Word), you can switch to an advanced view and search for character names (degree, theta, micro etc).

    In my opinion this should be built into the symbol dialog box in MS Office products.

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  1. Jay Freedman 207.5K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2011-08-13T19:22:33+00:00

    There isn't any such search built into Word -- although it seems to be an excellent suggestion -- but there is something you can do.

    Go to http://unicode.org/charts/charindex.html and use your browser's Find command to look for the name of the symbol you want. When you find it, note its Unicode number (in some cases you'll have to click the number to see a range of characters, such as the OCR range).

    In Word, type the number and press Alt+X, and the number will be replaced by the symbol. Alternatively, open the More Symbols dialog, choose Arial Unicode MS as the font, set the "from" box to Unicode (hex), and type the number into the Character Code box.

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 277.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2011-08-13T20:21:49+00:00

    This is very useful to know (though I agree with everyone else that this is a feature it would be helpful to have within Word itself). Now I just have to find a way of making it a little easier to access the Character Map; I'm using Windows XP and didn't immediately locate it (finally did find it buried at Start | Programs | Accessories | System Tools), so I was reduced to using Start | Run | Charmap.

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-08-17T08:10:43+00:00

    Thanks for the unicode suggestions Jay and Hans. I don't know if there are additional symbols (compared to the Windows character map I mentioned in another answer) to be found by this method, but good to know just in case.

    A problem with the suggested chart (http://unicode.org/charts/charindex.html) and method of searching, however, is that you cannot see all the relevant search results at a glance (you have to step through the search results using the browser's find command). Also, the symbols are not displayed which would make things difficult if I am not completely sure about the name.

    The Windows character map displays all the symbols that has a particular search term in their name.

    I'd be interested to know if there is a unicode character site with a proper search interface.

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  4. HansV 462.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2011-08-13T19:27:07+00:00

    That would indeed be a nice and useful feature to have, but it's not available in MS Office.

    You could search Google for unicode degree. From the list of search results, you can see that the hexadecimal code for the degree symbol is 00B0 - no need to open the item.

    In Word, type 00B0 or even B0, then press Alt+X, and voilà, you have the degree symbol.

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