Modelling using different keyboards

By Nick Crawley on April 22 2009

Recently I have had the pleasure to deliver in-house training on Project Finance Modelling to the European Investment Bank (the “EIB“). The EIB, located in Luxembourg has fantastic internal training facilities and offers the choice of several different keyboards for participants to work on. The experience of switching from one keyboard to another highlighted to me that the differences between the layouts can cause a fair amount of inefficiency especially for financial modelling in English. I can understand that different languages require different characters and that some characters will be used more frequently in say Hungarian than English but I question the need to change the operation of non-alphanumeric characters. Although I would qualify all of this by saying that European keyboards are still much easier to solve a circular reference on than when presented with a Japanese keyboard!

The different types of keyboard

The four main keyboard types found in Europe are

QWERTY
QWERTZ
AZERTY
QZERTY

The names represent the layout of the top left hand row of letters but the differences compared to QWERTY, on laptops include

Needing to press SHIFT to access the numbers along the top
Brackets are different locations and do not require SHIFT
+ , - , ‘ are in different locations
” and @ are often transposed

Specifically this also impacts financial modelling because the useful following commands are difficult to access

CTRL + SHIFT + [ ….to highlight all precedents on the worksheet
SHIFT + CTRL + 1,2,3,4,5 ….accessing default formatting does not work
ALT+E+S ….access the Paste Special menu

So if you are going to be working in Europe, be prepared to need to adapt your keyboard habits! This entry in Wikipedia will be a useful reference to brush up on the differences.