I'm not the one that originated this, but I'm responsible for the code-base now and every time I come across it I smile because it's one of those things that if you were asked you'd say "oh yeah, you can do that", but not the sort of thing I'd think of using in this manner.
I've got a grid display where the customer wanted to populate a cell with a read-only checkbox giving a visual of something being set or reset.
Rather than display 1/0 or Yes/No, the original authors translated the 1/0 in the database field to be the character 0x70 or 0x78.
If you change your font in the grid for that cell to Wingdings, 0x70 is p and 0x78 is x and you get what looks like a checkbox, but is simply text.
Looking a little closer at Wingdings, I see radio buttons there as well at 0xA1 ¡ and 0xA4 ¤.
Just thought that was clever enough to mention.