Tip of the day: Insert special characters anywhere, anytime

You’re typing a note on your American English keyboard, and you need to enter a character that isn’t represented by one of the available keys. Maybe it’s an inverted exclamation point or question mark, used in Spanish, or an accented letter for a French word, or some sort of umlaut or diaeresis. How do you get the character to appear on the screen?

There are several different ways, but one easy way is to fire up the Character Map utility. Click Start, Run, enter charmap in the Open dialog box, and click OK.

Pick a font from the list on top, and then scan through the list of available characters until you find the one you want. Click any character to magnify it and see an explanatory ScreenTip (as I’ve done above). You can double-click to insert the character directly into the current document, but before you do that, take a look in the lower right corner. That’s where you’ll see the keyboard shortcut that lets you enter the same character manually next time. Just remember that you need to hold down Alt and enter the characters on the numeric keypad, not on the row of numbers at the top of the keyboard.

Related: Enter international currency symbols in Office