How to: Bloomberg: The Keyboard

Bloomberg has data on more than 5 million bonds, equities, commodities, currencies & funds. It covers most every publicly traded company in the world, and has profiles on more than a million people. To boot, it has a rather unusual keyboard...

<Red keys> -- used to login or logout of the system. You can only be logged into one terminal at a time.

Black keys -- used to enter tickers, function codes, search terms, date ranges, et cetera.

<Yellow market keys> -- used to tell Bloomberg in what market you want to look e.g. equities, commodities, etc.

<Green keys> -- used to make Bloomberg actually do something. You can type in the ticker for a security and hit the correct market key, but if you do not hit the green <GO> button Bloomberg will not do anything.

Typically when using Bloomberg, your command might look something like this: TICKER <MARKET> FUNCTION CODE <GO>

The green <HELP> key is an extra special key on the Bloomberg keyboard. Use it to search the entire Bloomberg system. Simply type in your search terms and hit the <HELP> key.

When on an unfamiliar page, hit <HELP> once to see what help documentation Bloomberg has available on that page/function. Hit <MENU> to return to the former screen.

The green <MENU> key is used to move up a level or to exit out of pop-up screens. 

Information in the Bloomberg system is arranged hierarchically and in order to move higher up in levels you can use the <MENU> key.

If you want to go back to a previous screen you viewed, use the arrows at the upper left corner of the screen. These arrows act more like the forward and back buttons in a web browser.