How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and ...

How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and accented letters, in my document?

9/1/08 2:43 PM

How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and accented letters, in my document?

Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill

Many Word users don't realize how easy it is to insert special characters. There are at least four ways to do it: through the Symbol dialog, using shortcut keys, automatically with AutoCorrect, or by direct keypad entry.

The Symbol dialog

If you choose Symbol... on the Insert menu, you will bring up the Symbol dialog, shown below. (If you have a slow system and/or one with many fonts installed, you may find that this dialog takes an appreciable time to appear the first time you use it in a Word session, but after that it should pop up instantly.)

In the font list in the Symbol dialog, "(normal text)" means the font you are currently using. For more information about the other fonts listed, see Fonts in the Symbol dialog (below).

To insert a character, double-click on it, press Enter, or click the Insert button. The dialog stays open so that you can insert more than one character, and you can "step out" of the dialog to move the insertion point before choosing another character and inserting it.

Shortcut keys

Word has also made it very easy for you to insert many of these characters without



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How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and accented letters, in my document?

recourse to the dialog - in particular special characters such as ? and international characters such as ?. It does this through built-in shortcut keys. When you select a character in the dialog to which a shortcut key has been assigned (either by Word or by you, the user), it is displayed at the bottom of the dialog. The characters to which Word has assigned shortcut keys are broadly categorized as either "special characters" or "international characters." Memorize the shortcuts for the characters you use often, use the dialog for the rest.

Special characters Note that the Symbol dialog has two tabs: "Symbols" and "Special characters." The latter both lists the shortcut key (if any) for each of a variety of characters and lets you insert it directly (by selecting it and double-clicking or pressing Insert). The list is as follows:

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In the above list, note the following:

In the shortcut keys for the em and en dashes, "Num -" means the minus sign on the numeric keypad, as opposed to the hyphen on the top row of the keyboard (that is the key used in the shortcuts for the nonbreaking and optional hyphens). If you are using a laptop computer that doesn't have a numeric keypad or for some other reason don't have easy access to the numeric keypad, you might want to assign different keyboard shortcuts to these symbols.

In the shortcut keys for the various quotation marks, ` (accent grave) is the key at the top left of your keyboard (it also has the tilde ~ on it); ' and " are the apostrophe and shifted apostrophe (quote). These keyboard shortcuts use what is called a "setup key." The comma in the shortcut shows that you press, say, Ctrl+` and release. The status bar will display the combination you have pressed. You then press the remaining character. (As you will see, this technique is widely used in producing international characters.).

Other useful shortcuts that are not included in this list are Ctrl+@, Spacebar to produce the degree symbol (?) and Ctrl+/, c to produce the cent sign (?).

On the Symbols tab, under "(normal text)", there are a number of fractions, which you can assign to shortcut keys if you don't want to use the Autoformat method of inserting fractions.

You may wonder why some of these shortcuts are needed. For example, if you have "smart quotes" enabled on the AutoFormat As You Type tab of Tools | AutoCorrect, you will get these characters automatically. But sometimes Word guesses wrong and gives you " when you want "; and Word always gets it wrong when you need two opening quotes in a row. In such cases, it is convenient to be able to force Word to give you what you want.



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How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and accented letters, in my document?

Note that there are no assigned shortcut keys for some of the characters. You can assign your own shortcuts if you like; for example, I have Alt+Ctrl+M and Alt+Ctrl+N assigned to the em and en spaces. To assign a shortcut, just select the desired symbol and press the Shortcut Key... button. The Customize Keyboard dialog opens with the insertion point in the "Press new shortcut key" box. Just enter the key combination you want to use and press Assign. If you want this shortcut to be available in all your documents, press Close. If you are using a template other than Normal.dot and want the shortcut key available only in documents based on that template, select it in the "Save changes in" list before closing the dialog.

You can use this same technique to assign a new shortcut to a character (even if Word already has a built-in one). The one you assign will take precedence over the built-in one. If you later decide you don't need this shortcut, select it in the "Current keys" list in the Customize Keyboard dialog and press Remove. Word will then revert to the built-in shortcut.

International characters Word also provides built-in shortcuts for many of the accented and other special characters needed to type foreign words. If you are using a language other than English exclusively or primarily, there are more efficient ways to type (for more information on this, see Word's Help under "characters, international"), but for the occasional foreign (or domesticated) word that needs an accent, these shortcuts are very handy. Word provides a complete list of these shortcuts in the Help article "Type international characters" (reached via "international characters, type international characters" or "characters, special, type international characters"). The list is as follows:

To produce

Press

?, ?, ?, ?, ? ?, ?, ?, ?, ?

Ctrl+` (accent grave), the letter

?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ! ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, "

Ctrl+' (apostrophe), the letter

?, ?, ?, ?, ? ?, ?, ?, ?, ?

Ctrl+Shift+^ (caret), the letter

?, ?, ? ?, ?, ?

Ctrl+Shift+~ (tilde), the letter

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Ctrl+Shift+: (colon), the letter

?, ? ?, ?

?, ? #, $

Ctrl+Shift+@, a or A Ctrl+Shift+&, a or A Ctrl+Shift+&, o or O Ctrl+, (comma), c or C Ctrl+' (apostrophe), d or D



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How can I insert special characters, such as dingbats and accented letters, in my document?

#, $

Ctrl+' (apostrophe), d or D

?, ?

Ctrl+/, o or O

?

Alt+Ctrl+Shift+?

?

Alt+Ctrl+Shift+!

?

Ctrl+Shift+&, s

Note that in the above shortcuts, unlike many of the others, you get a different symbol depending on whether the combining letter is capital or lowercase.

AutoFormat and AutoCorrect

Many symbols are or can be entered in Word automatically through the action of AutoFormat and AutoCorrect.

AutoFormat We have already mentioned the "Replace as you type" option to replace "straight quotes" with "smart quotes." Other options are to replace "Fractions with fraction characters" and "Symbol characters with symbols." The example given for the latter is replacement of -- (two hyphens) with a dash. Note that this works only when the two hyphens are not preceded or followed by a space. If you include spaces, they may sometimes be converted to an en dash. On the other hand, a hyphen is not converted to an en dash (even in many places where it would be appropriate) unless it is preceded and followed by spaces (and the spaces remain around the en dash), so keyboard shortcuts may still be needed for ultimate control. And remember that whenever Word converts anything you type into something you don't want, you can reverse just the AutoCorrect or AutoFormat with Undo (Ctrl+Z).

AutoCorrect Many special characters are defined as AutoCorrect entries. Since these all sort to the top of the AutoCorrect list, it is easy to review them. They are also summed up in this list, found in Word's Help under the topic "Create arrows, faces, and other symbols automatically" ("symbols, creating automatically"):

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Note that some of these (such as ?, ?, TM) overlap Word's built-in shortcut keys. This gives you more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Also, the shortcut keys give you backup in case you want to delete the AutoCorrect entries. For example, perhaps you often create lists beginning with (a), (b), (c), and you get tired of having the list become (a), (b), ?. So you delete the AutoCorrect entry for (c). But you can still create ? using Alt+Ctrl+C.

Note also that the remaining entries (the "dingbats") are characters from the Wingdings font. They can be entered from any font and will not change if you change fonts.

You can create an AutoCorrect entry for any special character. Just select the character in the Symbol dialog, press the AutoCorrect... button, and type the combination of letters or symbols you want to be replaced by the given character. Note that the entry is stored as "formatted text" and therefore will be entered in the selected font regardless of what font you are using in your document.

Direct keypad entry

The oldest way to insert special characters in Word, and still one of the most dependable, is to enter the character number on the numeric keypad. The 256character ANSI character set actually contains about 224 "characters"; the first 32 positions (character numbers 0?31) are reserved for other keyboard functions and printer control commands such as Escape, Backspace, Tab, Line Feed, Carriage Return, and so on. If you know the number of the character you want, you can enter it by pressing the Alt key and typing the number, preceded by enough leading zeroes to pad it to four digits, on the numeric keypad. For example, to insert the ? character, you would enter Alt+0165. The advantage to this method is that it works in virtually any Windows application, not just Word.

But how can you find out the number of the character in question? If you select Insert | Symbol in Word 97 and above, this information is available from the status bar. When you select a character in the Symbol dialog, the status bar displays (for example) "Insert Times New Roman character 165."

In Word 2000, it also displays the Unicode number for character numbers 160 and above ? for example, "Insert Times New Roman character 165, (Unicode: 00A5).". For



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