New Tricks

I'm always keen to find a new way to kill some time during the less exciting work hours, so was quite pleased when one of my colleagues, out of the blue, told us this keyboard shortcut to write a half as a fraction.

His mum, apparently, had told him how to do it and he'd forgotten until now. Apparently, there were other such shortcuts.

So I tried the one he'd shown me, but changing a couple of keys. Sure enough, it did something a bit weird. Suddenly I was overtaken by a frenzy of alt key shortcuts. It turned out there were several different ways of doing a half. During the next ten minutes, I managed to produce a smiley face, a musical note (quaver), two musical notes, (two quavers), a coloured in smiley face, various arrows pointing up, down and sideways, accents including circumflex, umlaut, accute, grave, and the one which looks like a little circle that I don't know what it's called. Also I managed to write a three in the air (signifying cube). Along with a couple of shortcuts which involved pressing about four different keys to get a z or a number 7. Possibly not so useful.

Of course, in all that excitement, I didn't write any of them down - leaving it open for me to waste an even longer period at a later date.

Now, I just have to figure out a way of getting some arrows and musical notation into one of my stories. Any ideas?

More on that story later.