162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text

- I have a table here with a bunch of numbers, and these are dollar amounts, or maybe yen, or euros. I don't know. But I'd like to apply a currency symbol to the number automatically, you know, without having to type it. Why can't I make a paragraph style or a cell style apply the currency symbol? Well, it turns out I can, and the trick lies in an unlikely place, bullets. I have the cursor inside that table cell there, and I'm going to switch to the paragraph mode in my control panel and turn on the bullet feature. Now that bullet is a round dot, but who says a bullet has to be a round dot? I hate these round dot bullets.

Makes me feel like I'm in Microsoft Word or something. Instead, I'm going to change this to a cooler bullet, a currency bullet. To do that I'm going to hold down the Option key on the Mac, or Alt key on Windows, and click that same button again, the Bullets button in the control panel. That brings up the Bullets and Numbering dialog box. Now there's several different options for bullets here, and I'm going to create my own, a new bullet here by clicking the Add button. When I click the Add button, I can choose any character from any font I have on my system.

So, for example, I could choose the dollar sign. When you add a bullet, you have a choice, down here this check box, Remember Font With Bullet. In other words, when you apply this bullet, do you always want it to be this character in this font or not? And here where we're trying to apply a currency character we don't want it to remember that particular font. We just want the character, a dollar sign. I'll click OK, and I'll select that inside my Bullets and Numbering field, and you can see that there's a little U here underneath the dollar sign.

That means it's going to apply any font not just the Minion font that we chose. So I select that, and now I need to do one more thing in here. I need to remove the tab, that caret T means tab. I'm simply going to select it and hit the delete key on my keyboard to delete it. Now there won't be any text after the dollar sign at all. Click OK, and there we go. It replaced that boring round dot with a dollar sign. Now, of course, once you've done one of these, you could turn it into a paragraph style easily enough. I'll open my Paragraph Styles panel, and I'm going to say this is a New Paragraph style called Prices, and I'll apply it to the selection.

Click OK. In fact, I'll apply it to all of these simply by dragging over all these cells, and clicking on this Paragraph style. With one click, I have a dollar sign in front of all of those numbers. This total down here is in the wrong font so I'm going to click down here and create a new paragraph style, This one's going to be the total price, and this one's going to be in a different font. So I'll click on the Basic Character Formats pane, and I'm going to change this to the font I want which is Myriad Pro. I'll just type M-Y to jump to Myriad Pro, and then let's make it bold.

Click OK, and you can see that not only did it change the font of the price, it also changed the font of the dollar sign, that bullet. Again, that's because that bullet character was not connected to the original font, not connected to a Minion. It'll have changed it to any font we're using. Now later on if we decide that we need to change the currency symbol, it's really easy. All we need to do is right-click on Prices, the paragraph style, click edit Prices, and then change the Bullets and Numbering. Remember this one used the dollar sign.

Let's add a different one. I'll click Add, and instead of clicking on the dollar sign up here, I'll change it to something different like maybe yen down here. Or, scroll down a little bit and I'll find my euro symbol, turn off the Remember Font with Bullet check box, click OK, select it in here, and then click OK. In an instant, all of those have changed from dollar signs to euro signs. Remember, sometimes you need to think outside the box, and Automatic Bullets and Numbering are a great way to apply all kinds of extra characters before text in your document.