Prism tip -- How can I insert a dagger or some other special character onto my graph?

Most people use the same characters on their graphs -- diamonds, squares, stars, and circles. These look great and they are the default with Prism. You are not limited to these, however. You can use almost any symbol or character on your graph. There are different ways to do it, however, for actual data point symbols or in graph titles or text boxes.

Special characters for data points

With Prism you are not limited to basic symbols or characters. You can use almost any symbol for the data points on your graph.

How to do it:

Double click on any data point to open the Format Graph dialog and roll down the symbol menu.

If you don' t see a symbol you like in the main list, click the More button to display a full list of fonts and characters.

Using Prism's Insert Character tool with text boxes

You can also use special characters in any text box on a graph, but your choices are more limited.

First, insert a text box using one of the T buttons on the Prism toolbar.

Click inside the text box and from the Insert menu, choose Insert/Character.

You can add math symbols, Greek letters, European characters, and Wingdings.

Hyphens

Click here to learn more about how to insert different kinds of hyphens and dashes.

If you can't find the character you want...

If the characters you want aren't there, use a couple of other methods. These are tools in the Windows and Mac operating systems - the same ones you use for Word and other programs.

Windows - Using Character Map

For Prism Windows, type "Character Map" in Windows search.

In the Character Map, you can select and copy a character to the clipboard. The advanced view lets you select a character by unicode number. (The Unicode for a double dagger is 2021). Note, not all fonts and characters will look the same when a file made with Prism Windows is opened with Prism Mac and vice versa.

Copy the character with Character Map and select a text block on your Prism graph and choose Edit/Paste. If the character does not look right when pasted into Prism, you may need to reset it to the correct font. You can use this method only for text boxes, not for actual data point symbols.

Mac - Using Character Viewer

If you use Prism for Mac, there is also a Character Viewer tool. To access this tool, use the "Control-Command-Space bar" keyboard shortcut, or select "Emoji & Symbols from the Edit menu of the Finder. Find more information in this article.

You can also choose to show the Character Viewer tool in the menu bar by checking the "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" checkbox in the Keyboard settings in System Preferences.

Here is where you will find "Show Emoji & Symbols" in the menu bar.

Use the search field at the top of the window, click a category at the bottom of the window, or click a button in the upper right-hand corner of the window to expand it. The expanded menu reveals more characters, different categories of symbols, frequently used symbols and font variation options.

When you find the character that you want, select the point where you want the character to go in Prism and click or double-click it to insert it into your text.