I tend to work in the US English world. I’m somewhat embarrassed to note that I really only know one language and most of my work has been with US centric industries. I’ve rarely had the need to deal with Unicode and most of my databases have used varchar() everywhere. However, I know a little about nvarchar and am trying to be better about becoming familiar with using these structures.

Recently I was working on a piece and needed to type a £ character. If I were on one of the Redgate demo systems, that would be no problem. There’s a key for this character. However, I’m a US centric guy on a US system.

I could have cut and pasted the character, but I was wondering if there was a way to type it. There is.

You can use ALT codes to type the Unicode character. In this case, it’s 0163, so you can hold down the ALT key and then type  ‘0163’. Doing that gets you £.

Pretty cool.