Type the Broken Vertical Bar ¦ in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Both in Office for Windows and Office for Mac.
Broken Vertical Bar ¦ symbol was sometimes used in computing. These days there’s no specific use for the broken vertical bar but it’s good to keep in mind as a design alternative to the vertical bar.
Old dot-matrix printers made a vertical bar that looked broken. After some switches in the ASCII and other formats last century, broken vertical bar finally settled with a place in the Unicode character set.
The solid vertical bar | is on most, if not all, modern keyboards, usually above the \ backslash or escape character.
How Broken Vertical Bar ¦ looks in different fonts.
Here’s some examples of how Broken Vertical Bar ¦ looks in common Office fonts.
Broken Vertical Bar ¦ codes
These are the important code numbers or values you’ll need to enter the Broken Vertical Bar or ¦
Decimal: 166 Hex: 00A6
Web: ¦ or ¦ or ¦
(web codes aren’t used in Microsoft Office, we’ve included them for the sake of completeness.)
Word and Outlook
The Broken Vertical Bar ¦ sign does NOT have an inbuilt shortcut in Word.
Use the standard Word Alt + X symbol shortcut 00A6 + Alt + X
Once in a document you can copy it to AutoCorrect and make your own shortcut.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
Insert | Symbols | Symbol and look for the Broken Vertical Bar symbol.
Windows
In Windows there are several shortcuts to enter the Broken Vertical Bar ¦ character into any program, but they use a numeric keypad, not the number row above the letters.
Alt + 166
Emoji Panel
Broken Vertical Bar is in the Emoji Panel under Symbols | General Punctuation .
See Emoji Panel is part of Windows 10 that totally sucks
Windows Character Map
The Windows Character Map accessory in all Windows releases
Character Map has a search feature, something missing from the Insert | Symbol in Office.
MacOS and Office for Mac inserting characters
On a Mac, to enter the Broken Vertical Bar ¦ symbol:
- Command + Control + Spacebar shortcut to open the Character Viewer.
- Search for “ Broken “ and the Viewer should find the symbol you need.
Despite the name Character Viewer, the Apple system tool will also insert characters into any program, including Office for Mac.
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