UK abbreviation for number

[rebecca siegel <rebecca -at- ZLOGIC -dot- COM>]

Hi all,

The company I work for is currently making changes to our software so
that we can sell and distribute it in the U.K. Our European sales
manager has said that we must eliminate dollar signs from the software
(for obvious reasons) and the pound sign (#) because it does not appear
on European keyboards.

I have two questions related to this:

1) Are there other standard U.S. keyboard keys/symbols that do not
appear on English European keyboards?

2) Is there any standard way to abbreviate "number" (as in Account
Number) in British English? In many cases, we can simply eliminate the
pound sign from field labels and messages, and, in other cases, we can
spell out the word "number," but there will cases when we can't spell it
out and we can't eliminate it entirely.

For example, if there are two fields on a cramped screen, one for
customer number and one for customer description, we obviously can't
just get rid of the pound sign for the customer number because it then
becomes unclear what we want the user to enter in that field.

Some programmers here have suggested abbreviating number as N. I think
that would be unclear, but don't have another suggestion yet (which is
why I'm writing to you).

Can any of you who are writing in the U.K. (or who are writing for
software being used in the U.K.) give me some help? Please write to me
directly and I will summarize to the list if requested.

Thanks for your help!

Rebecca Siegel
Logic Associates
rebecca -at- zlogic -dot- com

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