7 Ways To Type Currency Symbols On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you different ways that you can type currency symbols on your Mac. 

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So a question commonly asked online is how to type different currency symbols on your Mac. Let's start off with some of the most used currency symbols. These you can type just on your keyboard using no special techniques other than the modifier keys. Now I'm going to assume that you are using a US keyboard. But don't worry I'll talk about other keyboards later on. 

So to type the dollar sign all you need to do is use Shift and 4 and that gets you a dollar sign symbol and that's pretty universal across lots of different keyboards. If you want to have a cent symbol then use Option 4 instead of Shift 4. Now there are other symbols that use the number keys and modifiers as well. For instance, Option and 3 will get you the British pound. Shift and Option and 2 will get you a Euro sign. Then there is one last one that you can type with the keyboard and that's using Option and y for Yen. 

Now, of course, there are many more currency symbols than just those. You can get to any of them using the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. So, there are two ways to bring that up. One is to use Control and then Command and then Space and it brings it up. You can also use the fn or Globe key and e. That brings that up. Now there are a lot of different symbols here. You can scroll through them and find the currency ones. But you can also just search with the field at the top. If you don't see the field scroll Up so you can see it there. Then type the name of the symbol that you want. So, for instance, if you wanted to type a Euro symbol just search for Euro and you'll find it here and you can click to select it and it types it. This also helps with symbols that you can't easily type with the keyboard. So I'll search for Rupee and you can see it comes up there. Here if I search for the Shekel you can see I can access that as well. Note that the more that you use characters the more they will appear here at the top under Frequently Used. 

You also can add them to your Favorites. The way to do that is to click on the button at the top right hand corner of the Emoji & Special Character Viewer and it switches to the regular character viewer. Now you can search for the symbol you want or just find it here if it is already one in Frequently Used and drag it to Favorites. So now when you look at Favorites you can see it here. You can even rearrange these and put it first. Now switch back to the Emoji & Special Character Viewer with the same button at the top right and the next time that you want to use it just bring it up and you'll see it listed under Favorites and can easily select the ones you need. 

Now also in the Character Viewer here you may notice that there is a section called Currency Symbols. You can go to it and see all the different currencies symbols. This is really useful for finding one that you may not know the exact name or spelling of the name and you can select it here. You can drag one here to Favorites, for instance. Then add it there. So if you don't see currency symbols here click on the three dots button at the top left and then choose Customized List and make sure Currency Symbols is checked. 

Now you can also type the Unicode Code for that character if you know it. The way to do that on the Mac is first go into System Settings and then go down to Keyboard. Once you're in there go to Input Sources and Edit. You're going to want to Add another input source. Now scroll all the way down to the bottom and you'll find Others. Select that and you'll see Unicode Hex Input. Add that and now you've got two keyboards. In this case US and Unicode Hex Input. When you have more than one keyboard you'll now see Keyboards here at the top and you can select a different one. So I can select this one. Now when I'm using this keyboard holding the Option Key down allows me to type something like a Unicode Code. So, I can hold the Option Key down and while continuing to hold Option I can type 20B9 and you can see that gets me a Rupee. If you want to find what the Unicode symbol is for something go to your web browser and search for Unicode, like that, and then for the name of a currency, like let's say Euro. Then you'll see here what the code is. Goggle usually gives it to you right there at the top. 

Now instead of going up to the menu here and switching between the keyboards like this you can also set it up so  you can easily switch with a keyboard shortcut. So let's go back into System Settings and then to Keyboard again and then go to Keyboard Shortcuts and if you look under Input Sources here you'll see your Keyboard Shortcuts for quickly switching between the Input Sources. Also notice that there is a setting here for Press the fn or Globe Key to do something. In this case you could have it Change Input Source. So holding down the fn key and pressing something else still works like before. But just tapping the fn key you could see changes the Keyboard Input. So you can easily switch the Unicode Keyboard and back again.

Now another thing you can do is you use Text Replacements to easily type these symbols. You just have to set it up first. This is handy because it is easy to remember what you setup. So you're going to go to Text Replacements here and you're going to add a new one with the Plus Button. Let's say I'm going to do dollar sign and then r for rupee. Dollar sign being easy thing to type but $r is not something you would normally type so it is not going to accidentally get triggered. Then I'm going to use the Emoji & Special Character Viewer to search for or just get the Rupee symbol here and Add. 

So now when I go into an app like TextEdit here or Mail or whatever I'm using I can type $r and notice how it wants to replace it with Rupee there. If I just put space it would do it automatically. It's a little tricky because you can't do something like, say, type $r and then a number it is not going to change it then. So you would have to do $r space and then back space and then type the number or if you type a number first and then do $r then it will usually work.  Now you can setup the Text Replacements for whatever currency symbols you need to use. 

Now let's go back to info sources and look at other keyboards. So, if you're not using a US keyboard here other keyboards may actually have the currency symbols you want as a keyboard combination already. For instance if we go down and find Hindi and do Hindi Standard you can notice that if you hold the Option Key down the Option 4 key will get you the Rupee and there are other keyboards that will do it as well. So, here's another one. Option 4 here also gives you Rupee. You can always go and search through the different keyboards here and find out which symbols you get when you hold the Option, the Shift, or Option and Shift. 

Now let's look at one more way to do this. That's using the Shortcuts App. So the Shortcuts App has a really simple way to setup a keyboard shortcut that types something. I'm going to add a new shortcut here and I'm going to call this Rupee. I don't even need to use an actual action. All I need to do is search for Text and just use the Text Action here and just put the text of a Rupee symbol in it. So I'll use the Emoji & Special Character Viewer to do it once and there it is. All this shortcut does now is generate the symbol. So, if I go to the Info part of the shortcut here on the top right, look under Details and say provide output. That means whatever is generated by this shortcut will then be output. So the text will come out of this. Then I add a keyboard shortcut for this. Let's do something like Option Command and 4. Now this shortcut should run when we use that keyboard shortcut there and all it should do is output this text here. This text could be anything. It could be a paragraph of text if we wanted to but we're just doing this single symbol here. So now to type the Rupee symbol I'll do Option Command 4 and it will run that shortcut and type it. So that's just a handy thing to know if you're using it for currency symbols or anything else. 

All these techniques should work in most apps including things like Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and even third party apps although it is possible that some third party apps like Word may have some special code in them that does something different with keyboard shortcuts and, in fact, some of those apps may have their own ways of typing some currency symbols or any special symbol.

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.