Alt key codes give you access to hundreds of special ASCII characters, from accent marks to tiny icons. We show you how to use the Alt codes and also Word's Symbol library.

Create a shortcut code by pressing the code and clicking Assign and then Close. In Excel, it’s a bit more complicated because you cannot assign a keyboard shortcut the way you can in Word. As you saw ...

The programme also tended to mistake identification codes like “2310009E13” for numbers in scientific notation—in this particular instance, the code would be read as 2.310009 times 10 19.