Reference sheet prepared by Jolene M. Morris, District Technology Director, Grand Co. School District
ASCII is an acronym which stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is pronounced "ask key". This set of characters was devised in 1968 and make up those characters a computer can display on the screen.
A knowledge of ASCII characters is helpful in programming and in programming-like functions such as writing batch files. It's also helpful to know about ASCII files when you do word processing or when you write e-mail.
To display an ASCII character which does not appear on the computer keyboard, hold down the ALT-key, type the ASCII character's number on the numerical keypad, then release the ALT-key. Some printers can print the ASCII characters but some can't, your printed document may not look the same as your screen display.
In WordPerfect, you can display the ASCII characters as explained above or you can press CTRL-W and select the ASCII character from a chart in case you don't know its number.
