Today I was at a meeting and since I'm an IT guy somebody asked me how to insert the Euro symbol into an e-mail or document. Ashamedly enough I was stuck for words, since I always bypassed this problem by using the EUR or E abbreviation. To prove that I'm a good boy at heart I did some homework on the subject.

Since the introduction of the Euro is relatively new not all operating systems and applications will automatically support the Euro character. The following key variants were tested on Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 on an English layout keyboard. The tests worked on Word, Outlook 2003 and notepad so I think that they should be applicable to most applications.

Most modern keyboards have a printed euro near the number 4 on the numeric row (above the letters). Now, we all know that we can get a dollar by pressing [Shift] [4] but how can you get the Euro currency symbol? Here are all the options that worked out for me.

• [Right Alt] + 4
• [Right Alt] + e
• [Ctrl] [Alt] + e
• [Ctrl] [Alt] + 4

Apparently the [Right Alt] key (also known as [Alt Gr]) is a shortcut key for [Ctrl] [Alt] in this case. On my keyboard there is no euro symbol on the keyboard but the above key sequences still worked fine.

If this approach fails you can always used the ASCII code value for the euro. This can be achieved by holding down the [Left Alt] button and on the numeric keypad (the numbers on the right) type 0128.

The last issue is how to display the Euro in an HTML document. The correct numeric reference is € and the correct entity reference is €. However keep in mind that old browsers will not support the newly introduced character. An image with the Euro symbol or the EUR abbreviation will probably be the best solutions for now, to ensure a uniform page display.

I got a mail by Seth Dillingham on how to type the Euro symbol on Mac OS X:- "... on Mac OS X, the euro symbol is typed with option-shift-2 (also known as alt-shift-2)."