Most of my posts seem to be nerdy and this is more of the same, but if you’re into vapor intrusion and wanting to properly present results in Excel, you might find this helpful.

While presenting VOC concentrations in micrograms per cubic meter in Excel, I noticed the greek-letter mu was being used instead of the proper “micro” SI prefix symbol. Yup, go ahead and snicker, there are subtle differences between the two.

If you’re on a Mac, the following shortcut defaults to the “micro” SI prefix symbol: hold down the Option key and type the “M” key on your keyboard.

*Update* The instructions for Windows don’t appear to work in Office 2016, hence the strikeout below.

If you’re using Windows or are trying to utilize other unicode symbols, the longer way of doing this may be more helpful. To produce an SI prefix symbol for micro and a superscript 3, this is exactly what you’ll need to type on the keyboard if you’d like to enter “35 ug/m3” in an Excel cell (don’t type the “+” symbols or parentheses and what they contain):

3+5+spacebar+alt(hold it down)+0+1+8+1+(release alt key)enter

followed by:

g+/+m+alt(hold it down)+0+1+7+9+(release alt key)enter

Another way to do this on a Mac is to enable Unicode Hex Input through System Preferences->Keyboard->Input Sources. If you anticipate you’ll be doing this frequently, check the box for “Show Input menu in menu bar”. After Unicode Hex Input is enabled, inside any Mac application enter an SI prefix symbol like micro by holding down the Alt key and then type in “00B5” or for a superscript 3, hold down the Alt key and type in the digits “00B3”. When you release the Alt key, your keyboard should return to normal entry.