Uses For Special Keyboard Symbols On a Mac

The symbols that you get when you hold Shift and type a number all have special uses in addition to their use in text. Many are math or logic functions, some are used in Internet communication or social media. New features in macOS Monterey will bring official uses for some of them on macOS for the first time.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at the special uses for the symbols above the number keys on your keyboard.
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So each of the special symbols above the number keys on your keyboard has special powers depending upon how you use it on your Mac. I'm going to stick to the symbols on the US keyboard in this tutorial. Let's start with the one key which if you use Shift will give you an Exclamation Mark. Now this symbol is sometimes used in computer code to indicate Not. For instance here's some JAVAscript in Automator. You could see here I set the variable a to 3 and I'm testing to see if a is 4. So if I look at the results here and run this you're going to see it says No. But if I were to put an exclamation mark before this, I have to enclose the entire thing in parentheses, then it's going to look for Not a is equal to 4 reversing the entire condition here. I run it and now it says Yes.
So lots of programming languages use an exclamation mark for Not but unfortunately it doesn't work that way in either Spotlight or in Numbers. But you can use an exclamation mark in Spotlight for factorial. This is a common symbol for factorial. So, for instance, 3! gives you 6. That's three factorial. In other words 1 times 2 times 3. If I were to do 5! I would get the results of 1 times 2 times 3 times 4 times 5 which is 120.
Next we come to the at @ symbol which is Shift 2 on US keyboards. Now you're familiar with the @ symbol. You use it in email addresses. Before the at symbol is the local address on the server, usually your name. Then after it is the server address. You also see the @ symbol used in social media. For instance in front of Twitter handles or in a lot of places where you simply want to type somebody's handle in the service you start with an @ symbol and then start typing their name. This spills over into macOS in macOS Monterey in the Messages app. If you're in a group chat you can use the @ symbol to refer to somebody in a message by their name. You will be able to do that in Notes as well when you have collaborative notes with many people.
Next we have Shift 3 which gives you a symbol which is sometimes called Number, sometimes called Pound, and sometimes called Hash or Hashtag and you use that in social media to indicate a hashtag. So it's very common on Twitter or Instagram or even YouTube to put a hashtag with a topic description after it. You're going to be able to use that in macOS Monterey in Notes to apply tags in Notes. So you can use hashtags throughout your notes and search for them or view all the notes that have a certain hashtag.
Now next on US keyboards, of course, is Shift 4 which is the dollar sign key. It's going to be different on other keyboards. But you can use this in places like Spotlight to indicate currency. So, for instance, if I put $20 it's immediately going to know I'm talking about dollars and it's going to give me a conversion right there, usually to Euros is the default. Now in Numbers you can use the dollar sign as well and it will instantly know that this number is supposed to be formatted as currency. So instead of just typing 20 I put dollar sign 20 and it knows to keep the dollar sign and put two decimal places after it. Now you will also find this in coding to indicate variables. For instance if you were to add a Shell Script in Automator here and set the input as arguments you can see the default that a coder gives uses dollar signs here to define variables. As a matter of fact you're also going to see the at @ symbol here to define the incoming parameters.
Now Shift 5 gives you the percent symbol. This is used, usually, to represent percentages. As a matter of fact Numbers will take this literally as percentages. So, if I put 20% it will then convert that to a percentage. In other words that's really 0.2 if I select it and look at the actual value it's 0.2 which stands for 20%. You can use this in Spotlight as well. So, for instance, if I wanted to calculate a 20% tip upon something, and it's say $75 I can multiply that by 20 and then add percent and it's going to calculate the percentage of that. So $75 times 20% is 15. Sometimes you also see percent in URL's or in other places where there is coding to represent certain characters. It's called URL encoding. For instance percent to 0 is the hexadecimal number 32 representing a space.
So next with Shift 6 we've got a little symbol that looks like an up arrow. It's actually called a Caret and it's typically used in math functions for an exponent. So, for instance, if you wanted to do 5 squared you can do 5 and then caret to the 2nd power. That gives you 25. I can do to the 3rd power as well. This will work in Number's formulas too. So I'm going to hit equals here to do a formula, let's say 5 and then the caret symbol for power, 2 and you can see it raises the 5 to the 2nd power. Sometimes you actually see this typed out. So you can actually use 5 and then caret 3 like that when you want to indicate 5 to the 3rd power without having to mess around with formatting. Sometimes you'll see people use this in Chat either in social medial or in Messages to indicate the line above. For instance, you might see a line of these and a comment like, this exactly.
Next we've got Shift 7 which gives you the ampersand or And symbol. In coding this is often used to represent literally and when you're doing numerical functions. Sometimes you need to add two of them. For instance in this bit of JAVAscript here testing for a = 3 and b = 4 and I get the output True because both of those are true. A single ampersand in programming is used to perform a bullion operation called And where combines the bits of two different numbers. Now it's often used also to concatenate two strings. For instance in Numbers you can use it this way. So I could use the function concatenate and then include one and then another like that to combine these two strings. But a simpler way to do it would just be to use an ampersand between each one like that. Also sometimes ampersands are used when composing HTML or other types of text for special characters. Like for instance ampersand bull followed by a semi-colon will give you a bullet character. There are these little codes for all sorts of different characters and also you can use numbers to get a specific character using an ampersand for it.
Another way you might see this is inside of URL's to define variables. So sometimes you'll have an URL and then a question mark which then leads to a set of variable declarations. Like here I've got a, b, c and between each one I've got an ampersand.
Next we have Shift 8, the asterisk. This can be used as a wildcard when doing searches in a lot of different situations. You can't use it that way in Spotlight or Finder. But for instance in Terminal using Shell Commands you can. So this command here will actually find any file that begins with IMG. You can see it quickly searches the current path for those and returns a bunch of results. You can also use it in Goggle searches to replace an entire word. So you can do something like this. You notice I'm putting quotes around it to find an exact match. But an asterisk says put any word in that one position. When you're programming, of course, you can also use the asterisk as a wildcard in a lot of different situations. But the other bit way an asterisk can be used that a lot of new computer users don't know about is it's used for multiplication. So you're used to seeing the multiplication symbol written as something as an x. But on a computer keyboard you type that with an asterisk. So in Spotlight if you want to multiply two things like 3 times 5 then you have to use an asterisk. Even in the Calculator App you can use an asterisk instead of clicking on this button here. So 3 times 5. The same is true in just about every programming language using asterisk in a mathematical calculation means multiply.
Now the last two keys is the 9 and the zero key. If you use Shift you're going to get regular parenthesis with those. Now, of course, you use those while writing. But you use those on the computer a lot for math to group things together. So, for instance, in Spotlight if you wanted to do something like 3+5*7 you're going to get things grouped together using the traditional order of operations. So 5 is going to be multiplied by 7 before being added to 3. But if that's not what you intended you could use parentheses to group things together. Here 3 is added to 5 first and then multiplied by 7. You can nest parenthesis as deeply as you want. It's common to use these when coding to not only group together things in math formulas but when you're doing logical tests. You group bits of logic together. Of course you would use these in Numbers as well. So if I was doing a formula here where I wanted to add these two together before multiplying by this I could do a parenthesis and then add these two together and then multiply using the asterisk, although in Numbers it will actually show you a multiplication symbol even though I typed Shift 8 and then put that there and then I'll get the correct result because I grouped together the parts of the calculation exactly as I wanted them to be.
Now I've shown some major uses for all these symbols. But there are even more. For instance if you get to using regular expression in programming or perhaps in spreadsheets like the regular expression functions in Numbers, pretty much all those symbols have some other use as part of regular expressions. But that's pretty advanced stuff. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

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