agorganic wrote:
I want to use it in the labeling of a heading for a table that I am inserting into a scientific based practical report (word document).It doesn't have to be excel, I could very easily copy and paste it from the internet or word!
There are standard math notations that any physical scientist should recognize as meaning "between".
However, it is unclear how you would use it in table __heading__, just as it is unclear how you would use less-than (<) or greater-than (>) in a table heading.
So let's start there. Would you write "x<" and "x>", or "<x" and ">x", to indicate that the numbers below are less-than and greater-than? Either way seems ambiguous without explanation. __What__ is "<" or ">" x? That is, does x represent the numbers in
the column; or does x represent the thing that the numbers in the column are relative to?
Sometimes this is dictated by convention for the specific scientific discipline. You should ask a reviewer.
And since "between" requires two numbers, how would you represent the pair of numbers in the column under the heading?
Anyway, the common math notations for "between" come in two flavors.
- a<x<b, a≤x<b, a<x≤b and a≤x≤b to mean "x is between a and b", where less-than (<) means not including a or b, and less-than-or-equal (≤) means including a or b.
The symbol ≤ can be entered by pressing and holding ALT while typing the digits 243 on the numeric keypad, then releasing ALT. However, that is in the Extended ASCII character set. That might be suitable for printing. However, it might not be suitable for
electronic documents. Some keyboards do not use that character set; and some document readers do not recognize that character set in unstructured documents (i.e. not HTML or the like).
I think it is also acceptable to use <= instead of ≤, albeit not as elegant.
BTW, you might also write a>x>b and similar variations, using ALT 242 for ≥. I wonder if that is preferred in right-to-left languages.
- (a,b), [a,b), (a,b] and [a,b] to mean "x is between a and b", although we sometimes say "x is on a and b", an idiom from set theory. In this notation, parentheses mean not including a or b; square-brackets mean including a or b.
