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I’m a little surprised that, as far as I can tell, I’m the only person on this forum who is interested in smart quotes – the kind of directional, curved quotation marks that appear automatically in posts made in this forum but that are very difficult to use in AppSheet apps. They look like “this.” I’d like to try to make the case for an improvement in the platform and see if I get a response. If not, I’ll give up for now.
First, because I have a long-term interest in using AppSheet in language education and therefore want language to look right in the app, I’ve gone to the trouble to figure out how display proper “smart” quotes in AppSheet:
Unfortunately, however, my method is something of a pain in the rear end to implement and it has the additional disadvantage of forcing the creator to construct virtual columns when directional quotes are required. Today, I came up with a slight improvement in this approach but the basic problems remain.
Fixing this problem could be implemented by adding CHAR() to the AppSheet expression arsenal. I’m not sure how hard that would be for the engineers at AppSheet but it would make things quite straight-forward but creators who need to use special characters. CHAR() is, of course, how Google spreadsheets lets us use such characters (often inside of CONCATENATE()).
I’ve posted in the past about emoji and other special characters and those posts got moderately enthusiastic responses. That’s partly why I’m scratching my head about the lack of discussion about directional quotation marks and the need for a CHAR() expression. I’ll be interested to read any responses this post gets. 
I appreciate your help but my test indicates “not really”:
. . . produces . . .
But these are straight/dumb, not smart. My method produces this:
It’s a subtle difference in this font but the different is more pronounced in other fonts.
Joined!! (Just the free course 
I’m kinda cheap – I’m still using AppSheet on the free plan. )
Even though I don’t share your antipathy toward smart quotes, I think your comment is informative. My hypothesis is that this is a cultural thing. If this were a forum for literary types, I suspect there would be many more people who share my interest in the curly cues. Conversely, I suspect that people who have a lot of experience coding would probably prefer that the squiggles but done away with entirely. But, if we have CHAR() we can decorate are little apps as we see fit, without causing trouble for others.
