I have to lead off with a disclaimer – I haven’t tried this yet.  It’s from TechTrax – a very useful third party support source for Microsoft applications.  Between them and WOPR, I have never failed to find a needed answer to a question about MS Word, Excel, Visio, Project and other MS-official torture devices I use in the course of writing proposals.  Most of the time in fact my answers are sitting ready to be found in the various discussion forums and articles on those sites.  (Instant expert help is always appreciated).

I know there are lots of people who use Excel or Word to set up knitting charts.  Some of them wish knitting fonts were more widely available or (more importantly) more intuitive, or more like symbol sets with which they’re familiar.  Others have looked into building their own knitting symbol fonts.  That’s a big task, and there are all sorts of tools to help.  It turns out that there is a hidden, free tool avaialble to MS Windows users – resident in operating system itself.  This tutorial takes you through using this character map editor to build custom symbols. 

The same site also recently published an article on creating custom graph paper in MS Word.

Other useful tools:

• Factor generator – useful for quickly figuring out possible repeats
• From the same site as the Factor Generator, a quick metric/imperial unit conversion utility
• And a grams/ounces coverter, too.

And so we see that knitting tools aren’t always found in knitting-specific places.  If you’ve come across something useful in an unlikely location please feel free to add a comment here.  I can assure you that someone, somewhere will be very, very grateful.