Say, for example, x.ħ. Next, go to Insert -> Symbol, drop down to “More Symbols”, and in the window that pops up, make sure you have selected “Arial Unicode MS” as the font. Only now, type in a letter that you want to adorn with a bar. Voila, your p has a hat!! Now, type a few spaces and let’s do this again.Ħ. Going further right, there’s a dropdown that says “from:” and you’ll want to make sure that you see “Unicode (hex)” selected in that box. Click “Insert”.ĥ. That’s the code for a hat-on-top-of-a-letter. To the right of the text area labeled “Character code:” type in 0302. In the bottom right, you’ll see a text area and a dropdown. Next, go to Insert -> Symbol, drop down to “More Symbols”, and in the window that pops up, make sure you have selected “Arial Unicode MS” as the font. First, type in a letter that you want to adorn with a hat. UNTIL THIS MORNING when I really, really, really wanted to be able to use y-bar and p-hat in my paragraph, without having to do the even kludgier thing where you just call them “y-bar” and “p-hat” in the text. That doesn’t feel good.Įven Arial Unicode MS, the behemoth of fonts (it even contains tons of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters) does not have essential statistical symbols. But turns out, it DOES have this very useful capability called “combining diacritics” - and here’s how you can use it to type characters with their own hats and bars on them:Ģ. However, I don’t want to be embedding images if all I have to do is make reference to a variable within a paragraph of text… and I’ve never had a good solution. This works nicely, and even though some people might think it’s a kludge, I kind of like the ability to retain the personality of my own handwriting in my technical documents. This has led me to apply what I like to call “agile shortcuts” - basically, I’ll write down the equation in my own handwriting, take a picture of it, and then use a paint program to crop and clean up my equation before inserting it into my document. And I have to type equations and expressions not often (like every sentence or every other sentence), but definitely regularly. I use Microsoft Word to prepare documents.

This is how ILLUMINATED I felt when I figured out how to type statistical symbols in MS Word… the temple at Burning Man 2014.

X bar symbol microsoft word