Sign one @, use many!

- ½ýe çkkçkíkku yuðe nkuÞ Au, su ykÃkýu hkus òuíkk nkuEyu Aíkkt yuLkk rðþu ðÄw òýíkk Lk nkuEyu, ykðk yuf rMkBçkku÷Lke ðkík

Thanks to email , UPI addresses and social media handles , the @ ( at) sign is very familiar to us now , but as is the case with almost everything , the use of at is not well-known to most people.

We might think that this symbol has been in circulation since the dawn of email , but it is believed to have started as far back as the fifteenth century , when a merchant first used it to indicate the number of jars of wine! This sign has its roots in Latin ' toward ' or ' at '. Also believed to be in the French word for. Italians call this sign a ' snail ' ( used in the superfast communication mode email!) , while the Dutch call it a ' monkey tail ' !

Now let's fast forward from history and talk a little about how this sign is used in our daily lives - something new will be learned and a little more clarified about it!

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While many people mispronounce ' at ' as ' at the rate ' when giving their email address , they are not entirely wrong. Emails only say ' at ' but this sign has been used to indicate ' rate ' in business or commerce , for a very long time!

For the purpose of commerce this sign is used as a short sign to denote ' at the rate of ' or ' at the price of ' . So if you want to write 'Rs 3 per banana, the price of a dozen bananas' then '12 bananas @ 3 = 36) It is supposed to be written like that.

Such usage is very old , but early typewriters did not include this sign. It was not until 1889 that the typewriter model added the convenience of typing this sign, and from the beginning of the 19th century, all typewriters began to see the At sign!

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Before today's internet , when different computers were connected to each other via ARPANET, an American computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson , in 1971, was trying to find a way to allow users of different computers to send messages to each other (what we call email today!). The question before them was that how to send the message to a particular machine , to a particular user ? How to distinguish machine and user name ? He thought of using some such symbol , which is not used in the name of a person! Finally he @ Drop the selection on the sign.

Today your address is yourname@gmail.com If so , yourname Our username (which only one person gets in an email service) and the last part is @gmail.com . Indicates the email service. From this address , the destination of the email message is determined!

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That's why @ in the email sign is used , almost for the same reason that this sign is also used in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). In UPI we can connect our bank account in different bank apps or with UPI apps of private companies like Phonepay , Googlepay. Such a company finally provides this service to us only with the help of some bank.

The beauty of UPI is that it is not necessary to create a UPI address only in the bank where our account is. So our UPI address should be one that contains our own identity and also the identity of the service/bank/app in which we have created the UPI account. The two should, obviously , always be distinct from each other - this is done with the @ sign!

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Two symbols are most popular on social media - # ( hashtag) and @ ( at). Both ultimately refer to something and make it easy to access , but they do different things. In simple terms, a hashtag mainly refers to a topic , the word with the hashtag is clickable by clicking on it , which leads to another post on the same topic on that social site , such as #gujelection . while @ Indicates a user (or company or other). For example, by clicking on a name with at , we can reach that user's profile page. There is no hashtag in WhatsApp , but there is At, while chatting in a group we can mention any user in the group by writing At. The exact usage of At varies slightly between Twitter , Facebook , Insta , YouTube , WhatsApp etc.

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Ok , in addition to the email address, the @ sign can also be used in Gmail when we are writing a mail to someone ! Especially , this feature is more useful when we are sending a common mail to more than one person or in a team. In this situation, it often happens that if the team leader is writing an email, he has to give different instructions to different members of the team. It is obvious that this mail should also go to everyone. Hence , while writing team leader mail @ in compose box With a name (and an email address in that person's name in their contact list), a notification can be written to them with their name in the text of the mail, and that person's email address is automatically added to To. Other people who receive this mail can click it and send a separate mail !

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Until then , @ Knowing the different uses of the sign must have flashed across your mind - the sign itself does not perform any miracles. Its only feature is that it is a sign , which is not used in the name of any person or company or other well-known things. Hence , it is used as an easy shortcut to anything.

Due to this characteristic of the @ sign, it is used in various formulas in Excel and also in various programming languages. The basic purpose is to use a sign that people can easily recognize when referring to something . But it may not be used much in other general matters! If Excel or Coding is your subject then @ Let's dig a little deeper.

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Let's talk now , @ A relatively new use of the sign.

You must know that the address bar in Google Chrome browser in your PC or laptop works as a search box of the search engine itself. This is why now if you want to search anything in Google, you don't have to go through the long exercise of going to google.com to reach its search engine. You can search by just typing anything in the address bar of the browser.

Now almost all browsers provide the facility to access the search engine from the address bar itself. Also we can set our preferred search engine as default search engine by going to browser settings. That is, if you like Firefox as a browser and Google as a favorite search engine, you can set Google as the default search engine in the settings of the Firefox browser. However, Google has long been people's first choice for both browser and search engine all over the world.

Now Google has made searching from the address bar in its Chrome browser even smarter and more powerful - you get it , @ With the help of! It works as a shortcut in the address bar. Because of this, we can search anything in the entire internet, and also search different things in the browser much faster.

Let's understand with an example.

Let's say you have seven-eight different Chrome windows open and in each of them you have 10-15 tabs open. So think of the total number of opened tabs! (This task becomes too heavy for even a computer to handle!).

Now it will definitely be difficult to find the required information again from all these tabs.

In such a situation , an issue is playing in our mind , we may have opened its webpage in a tab , but it becomes difficult to find it again in the plethora of tabs. As a result , instead of going through the hassle of searching for something in all the open tabs, you open another tab and search for the required information again. This adds another tab load to the browser and computer!

Now you don't have to do that. Just @ in the address bar . As you type , you will find bookmarks saved in your browser , history of opened webpages and search in tabs. To search for tabs , select a tab from the options below and type what you are looking for in the address bar , if any such tab is open , it will appear , clicking on it will take you to that tab!

If you are a heavy user of Chrome browser , you will find this facility very useful.

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In the ' technoworld ' we often , emphatically talk that now is the time for collaboration. We used to work in our own office , on our own PC , in our own file, it became an old way of working. Now is the time when different teams of people work together on a shared file in Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive .

To make teamwork easier during such collaborative work, Google Docs has added some special powerful features with the help of @ sign.

In the Google Doc we're working on (like the Gmail message we talked about above), if we want to write a notification mentioning a team member , add a link to any of our other files in Drive, we can write the @ sign anywhere in the document to get options . Also , a menu will open as per the screenshot below , with all these options. If we want to add today's , tomorrow's or any other date along with our text , we get the option.

Apart from this , above the menu there is also an option called ' Smart Chips ' (in the coming time we are going to see the use of such smart chips in various services of Google continuously increasing). With its help , we can create a drop-down menu in the document and also edit it as per your requirement. If a person needs to be assigned further work on a particular issue, it can also be added as a person's task.

All these facilities are also connected with other services of Google . As we add a date to a document in this way , we also get the option to add a note to its Google Calendar!

All this work for me right ?!

The answer to these questions depends on what kind of internet you use! All these details will go over your head if your usage is limited to mobile browsing!

But remember that there is an entire generation now , which is confused even by simple use of internet , computer or smartphone. What has been written here , especially about collaborative work , is going to become quite common in the future. Office work has started to be done in the same way.

Given that , if you are a student - in any stream - or if you are at any level in an office and have a computer on your desk, all these details are essential for you to know. But like some of today's elders, tomorrow you too will be talking about common things!