Missing Useful Characters from Your Keyboard? Discover Where to Find Them!

Home , Character Map (Windows), Copyright symbol, Windows key

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This article shows you how to: Type characters that don’t appear on your keyboard Quickly type accented letters in Microsoft Word Use emojis and special symbols in Windows 10

It may seem that the modern computer keyboard has more than enough keys to get things done. Then you realise you want to discuss the rôle someone played, or you can’t avoid using a cliché, or you need to explain that something is 2½ miles from Tromsø or Düsseldorf, or you want to claim your work as © Tara Masalata 2020. Suddenly that keyboard seems to be lacking a few keys! How do you produce those characters? Well, there are various ways – including a nifty new method that’s recently arrived in Windows 10 – and you can use whichever you prefer. Read on to learn how it’s done.

• Font Facts: Every Letter is Really a N umber! ...... T 986/2 • Character Map: Choose from Thousands of Characters ...... T 986/3 • Easily Find Special Cha racters in Microsoft Office ...... T 986/8 • Type Special Characters Using Numeric Codes ...... T 986/10 • Two Handy Tricks for Microsoft Word Users ...... T 986/13 • Windows 10: A New Way to Insert Special Characters ...... T 986/16

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Font Facts: Every Letter is Really a Number! A font is a series Whenever you type, you’re using a font – often one you’ve of picture s… chosen yourself from a long list which includes Times New Roman, Calibri, Tahoma, Arial and many more. Believe it or not, a font is a work of art: each of the letters, numbers and symbols it contains has been carefully designed with a particular style in mind. It’s effectively a series of little pictures. …each Each of those little pictures is referred to by a number. For represented example, when you type a capital ‘K’, your keyboard sends by a number the number 75 into your PC. The program you’re using then displays the 75th character in the font you’ve chosen – a character that should be recognisably K-shaped. And, needless to say, the 75th character in any font should always be something that looks like a K.

The exceptions to that rule are pictorial fonts like Wingdings, Webdings and Symbol. These are special fonts in which every character is a little picture – a car, a telephone, a heart, a smiley face and so on. If you select one of these fonts and type a ‘K’, you definitely won’t get anything K-shaped!

A font contains All fonts contain all the printable characters found on your hundreds of keyboard and at least a few others. But most fonts contain characters hundreds of characters, and some contain a few thousand, covering any letter you can think of from most of the world’s alphabets along with a huge array of extra symbols and punctuation marks. Here’s how to With that in mind, your keyboard's abilities really do seem get at them all! to be lacking! How can you get at all the other characters in those fonts? Well, much depends on which program you happen to be using at the time and how often you expect to need a certain character, but there are several ways, and I’ll run through them over the following pages.

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Character Map: Choose from Thousands of Characters The typical way to get at characters not found on your Use the keyboard is to use a program named Character Map, which Character Map is included with all versions of Windows. However, if you’re program using one of the Microsoft Office programs, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook, there’s a quicker and easier alternative to Character Map which I’ll explain on page 8. Whatever program you’re using at the time, whenever you Copy and paste need to use a character that doesn’t appear on your characters into keyboard, you can start the Character Map program and any program look for it there. In a nutshell, what you’ll do is to copy that character to the clipboard, switch back to the document you’re writing and paste the character at the required position. Let’s run through that process in steps:

1. The first job is to start Character Map: • Windows 10: open the Start menu, scroll down to : the ‘W’ section at the left and open the Windows Accessories folder, then click on Character Map . • Windows 8.1: click the Start button to switch to the Start screen, then click the circled arrow at the bottom of the screen (or press Ctrl + Tab ) to go to the ‘Apps’ section. Here, scroll to the ‘Windows Accessories’ group and click on Character Map . • Windows 7: open the Start menu, go to All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click on Character Map .

In any version of Windows, a quick way is to press the key to open the Start menu (or Start screen) and

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simply start typing the word ‘character’. Before you get far you’ll see Character Map at the top of the list of results.

Select the font 2. Now you’ll see the Character Map window on your you’re using screen, looking something like the screenshot below. As you can tell, its main feature is a large grid of characters, and in a moment you’ll scroll through this grid to find the character you want. First, though, it’s a good idea to open the drop-down list labelled Font 1 and select the font you’re using in your document. This ensures that the character you choose from this grid will be from the same font and will therefore match what you’ve already typed in style and size. Find the 3. Now it’s time to look through the characters in the character you grid to find the one you want. I’ve made that sound want to use easy, but if this particular font is one that contains thousands of characters, it might take some hunting around! Fortunately, the characters are arranged in a fairly logical way, so you’ll find related characters (such as those from a particular alphabet) grouped together.

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The characters are shown at a small size, but if you click any character you’ll see a larger version of it 2 . Once you’ve done that, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around, which is often easier than using the scrollbar at the right of the window.

4. When you find the character you want to use in your Click the document, either click it or (if you’ve already clicked character a different character) use the arrow keys to select it, so that you see it at a larger size 2 . 5. Click the Select button 3 and the character you’ve Click Select… chosen will appear in the Characters to copy box 4 . 6. Now click the Copy button 5 . You won’t notice …then Copy anything happen at this point, but the character you’ve chosen has now been copied to the Windows clipboard. 7. Switch back to the document you’re writing, click at Paste it into the point where the character should be inserted and your document press Ctrl + V to paste it there. Done!

4 3

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Now, if you choose to, you can close the Character Map window by clicking the x in its top-right corner. You can However, if you expect to need it again, you can leave it keep Character open. Just one word of warning: if you want to find and Map open copy a different character, delete the previous character from that Characters to copy box 4 first. Otherwise you’ll find you’ve copied both the previous one and the new one – not a disaster, of course, but not what you wanted. Speed tip: copy several characters in one go Construct This is really two tips in one. First, rather than a single and copy a character, perhaps you need a sequence of characters in foreign word your document – most obviously, a whole word in a different alphabet. In that case, find and click the first character and then click Select , then find and click the second and click Select , and so on until the Characters to copy box contains the sequence you want. Finally, click the Copy button to copy them all.

Copy a string Second, perhaps you know there are several characters of symbols in you’re going to need in your document – a variety of one go mathematical symbols, perhaps. In that case, you might like to find and select them all, as in the first tip above, and then copy the lot to a new line in your document. Since Character Map can be rather fiddly to use, that gets the job done and you can then close it. From that point, whenever you need to use one of these characters, you can simply copy-and-paste it from where you put it in your document. Later, when your document is complete and you no longer need that line of symbols, you just delete it.

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Can’t find it? How to search for a character Faced with a grid of perhaps 4000 characters, finding the one you want can be a frustrating job! Don’t give up, though: instead, try searching for it. As you click characters in the grid, you might have noticed Each character that they all have a description which appears in the extreme has a name bottom-left corner of the window. After the cryptic-looking ‘U+xxxx:’ there’s a recognisable name like ‘Exclamation Mark’ or ‘Copyright Sign’, and these names are searchable:

1. At the bottom-left of the window, tick the box beside Advanced view 1 . This expands the window : downwards to show a few extra options. 2. Click in the box labelled Search for and type a word Search for a (or part of a word) you’d expect to appear in the word you’d description of the character you want 2 . expect to be in 3. Press Enter and, with luck, the grid will change to the name show only the characters with that word in their descriptions 3 .

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4. Assuming this works, you can click the character you want and then click Select in the usual way. Having done that, delete the text in the Search for box and press Enter (or click the Reset button) to see the entire grid again. Having done that, if you want to find another character, you can type something different into the Search for box and press Enter .

Names aren’t The problem is that this won’t always work as well as you’d always what hope! You might type a perfectly-sensible word (such as you expect! divide if you’re looking for the ÷ symbol) only to find yourself looking at either an empty grid or the usual all- characters grid. You’re at the mercy of the way each character is described, and their descriptions are not always what you’d expect: ÷ is referred to as ‘Division Sign’ , so searching for ‘divide’ won’t work, and × is ‘Multiplication Sign’, so searching for ‘multiply’ won’t find it. Tip: type partial Therefore, a good trick is to type just a few letters that are words instead almost certain to be in the name (‘divi’ or ‘multip’, for instance). Likewise, if you’re looking for an ‘e’ with an acute accent, it’s best to simply search for ‘acute’ and then pick the é from the results, and if you’re looking for a particular Cyrillic letter, search for ‘cyrillic’ and then choose the letter you need from all the Cyrillic characters found.

Easily Find Special Characters in Microsoft Office Although you can use Character Map with Office programs like Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook, these programs include their own equivalent which is slightly easier to use: it involves less clicking, and it keeps a handy list of the symbols you’ve used most recently.

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Here’s how it works:

1. In the Microsoft Office program you’re using (or in an Outlook email message you’re writing), place the insertion point at the point you want to insert a : special character. 2. Switch to the Insert tab on the Ribbon. 3. At the right-hand end of the Ribbon, click the Symbol button 1 . 4. In some programs, such as Word and Outlook, you’ll Recently-used see the little panel pictured to the right. This shows the symbols are last 20 symbols you’ve used, 1 shown and if you’d like to use one of these again you can just click it to insert it into your document. If you don’t see the symbol you want here, 2 click on More Symbols 2 . 5. Now you’ll see the dialog pictured on the next page, Quickly insert a and you’ll notice it looks a lot like Character Map. character from Indeed, it works in much the same way in that you the grid look through the large grid at the top to find the character you want. From there it’s less fiddly: either click the character and then click the Insert button or, more simply still, double-click the character. That inserts it straight into your document.

Lower down, a single-row grid shows the last 16 characters you’ve used, and if you want to reuse one of those you can do so in exactly the same way.

6. There’s another benefit to this dialog that you don’t Pick from some get from Character Map. If you switch to the Special extra symbols Characters tab at the top, you’ll find a list of extra

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characters you can insert – common legal symbols, dashes, quotes and hyphens – and you can insert those into your document in the same way.

You can keep You can leave this dialog open (and move it out of your this dialog open way if necessary) to continue typing into your document if you choose. Type Special Characters Using Numeric Codes Enter special If you need to use characters regularly that don’t appear on symbols from your keyboard, it can quickly get tiresome to have to look the keyboard them up in Character Map. Fortunately, there’s another option and it relates to the point I made at the beginning of this article – that every character is represented by a number. If you know the number of the character you want, you can type it straight from the keyboard without going anywhere near Character Map. Example: To explain how this works, I’ll take one character – the copyright sign copyright sign (©) – as an example. If you find and click the copyright sign in Character Map and then look at the very bottom of the window, you’ll see this:

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This gives you two possible methods of entering a copyright sign straight from the keyboard:

Method 1: At the right you’ll see the word ‘Keystroke’ followed by Hold Alt , type Alt +0169 1 . This means you can type a copyright symbol 0169 on the into any program by holding down the A l t key on your numeric keypad keyboard and typing the four-digit code 0169 on your keyboard’s numeric keypad. (Note that you must type these figures on the numeric keypad: using the numbers on the keyboard’s top row won’t work.) The benefit of this method is that it works in any program. Not available for The catch to it is that not every character offers one of these all characters Alt +xxxx key combinations. Many of the most-used characters do, but if you find and click the 1/3 character, for instance, you won’t see a Keystroke: Alt +xxxx , meaning that this method can’t be used to type that character.

Method 2: This method works in Microsoft Word and in the WordPad A 4-digit code accessory. At the left you’ll see U+00A9 , and this gives you for Word and another four-digit sequence. (To be strictly accurate, some WordPad of the sequences, like this one, can include the letters A–F, but in the curious ways of computing, these letters represent digits too.) The way this works is simple. You type the four-digit code Type the 00A9 anywhere in a Word or WordPad document, and with code and press the cursor still sitting at the end of the code you’ve just typed Alt + X you press Alt + X . Instantly, that code is replaced with the character it represents – in this case, a copyright sign.

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Although this method has the drawback that it only works in Word and WordPad, it has the benefit that absolutely every character in Character Map offers one of these U+xxxx codes. Quick reference: numeric codes for useful characters You might The obvious catch with either of the methods above is how learn a fe w… you’re supposed to remember those four-digit codes! You might learn a small handful of them if you use them fre- quently, but it’s best to just make a list of the ones you need. …but it’s better To get you started, the table below lists a bundle of the most to keep a list! popular characters. The ‘Word’ column lists the codes you type into a document in Word or WordPad and then press Alt + X ; the ‘Anywhere’ column lists the codes you type into any program on the numeric keypad while holding down the Alt key.

Character Word Anywhere

€ (euro) 20AC 0128 ¢ (cent) 00A2 0162 ¤ (general currency) 00A4 0164 ¥ (yen) 00A5 0165 ° (degrees) 00B0 0176 ± (plus-minus) 00B1 0177 ¼ (quarter) 00BC 0188 ½ (half) 00BD 0189 ¾ (three quarters) 00BE 0190 ÷ (division) 00F7 0247 × (multiplication) 00D7 0215 – (en-dash) 2013 0150

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— (em-dash) 2014 0151 « (left angle brackets) 00AB 0171 » (right angle brackets) 00BB 0187 ¶ (pilcrow) 00B6 0182 § (section mark) 00A7 0167 · (middle dot) 00B7 0183 • (bullet) 2022 0149 © (copyright) 00A9 0169 ™ (trademark) 2122 0153 ® (registered trademark) 00AE 0174 œ (small ligature oe) 0153 0156 æ (small ligature ae) 00E6 0230

Two Handy Tricks for Microsoft Word Users If you use Microsoft Word, there’s another neat little trick Example: you can use that saves the need to deal with numeric codes easily enter for your most-used characters. Instead, you assign them the ÷ symbol one-word names. Let’s take the division sign (÷) as an example. We’ll call it ‘divide’ and we’ll make it possible to insert it into a Word document just by typing %divide%:

1. Switch to the Insert tab on Word’s Ribbon, click the Symbol button at the far-right and choose More : Symbols as we did on page 9. 2. In the grid of characters, find the ÷ symbol and click Click the ÷ it once to select it. symbol 3. Near the bottom-left of the Symbol dialog, click the Click Auto- AutoCorrect button. Correct

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4. Now you’ll see the dialog pictured below, with the ÷ symbol entered into the With box for you already 1 . Type %divide% 5. First, click the Plain text option 2 . Next, click in the Replace box and type %divide% 3 . Finally, click the Add button 4 and then click OK .

3 1 2

6. This takes you back to the Symbol dialog where you can add more characters in the same way. For instance, you might click the multiplication sign (×) and then the AutoCorrect button, and assign this one the name %multiply% .

Just type the Now, I must explain that the use of those % symbols is my name inside own invention, but it works a treat and it means you can % signs assign recognisable names to these special characters. Whenever you want to use one of those characters, you simply type the name you chose for it enclosed in % symbols, and Word instantly replaces it with the correct character. Of course, that does mean you have to remember what names you’ve chosen for the characters, but at least you get to choose them yourself, and they should be far more memorable than all those sequences of numbers!

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Type accented letters quickly in Word If you need to type accented letters into Microsoft Word, The two-step there’s a useful trick you can use to do it straight from the trick for keyboard. The trick involves two steps: in the first, you press accented a key combination that specifies the accent you want, and letters in the second you type the letter itself, to which Word will add the accent. This trick works for five different accents. Start by pressing Pre-select the the appropriate key combination for the accent you need: accent • Acute: press Ctrl + ’ (apostrophe) • Grave: press C t r l + ` (the key in the top left corner of your keyboard, to the left of the number ‘ 1 ’ key) • Circumflex: press Ctrl ++Shift 6 • Tilde: press Ctrl ++Shift # • Umlaut: press Ctrl ++Shift ;

Those key combinations aren’t as random as they may seem at first glance, and should be reasonably easy to remember. The acute and grave accents use symbols that look similar to the accent, in combination with the Ctrl key. The circumflex accent uses the caret symbol (^, Shift + 6 ) along with the Ctrl key. The tilde accent uses the tilde symbol itself (~, S h i f t + # ) along with the C t r l key, and the umlaut uses the colon (similar to an umlaut turned on its side) along with the Ctrl key.

Nothing will happen at this point, but don’t be deterred: Type the letter Word is now waiting to find out which letter this accent should be applied to. Next, type the character you want (such as ‘a’ or ‘A’). As long as you type a character that can legitimately have that accent applied, it will appear in your document.

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Windows 10: A New Way to Insert Special Characters A quick If you use Windows 10, there’s a new alternative to Character alternative to Map you might prefer. It’s quick and easy to start when you Character Map need it, and it organises its characters into straightforward categories, making it easier to find the character you want. Press + . Start by positioning the cursor at the point in your document where you want the special character to appear, then press the key combination + . (the Windows key and the full-stop key). Click the Up pops the emoji panel, containing a page of colourful little Symbols button pictures. Those aren’t what we want (although we’ll take a look at them a little later), but click the Symbols button 1 at the top and we’ll find what we’re looking for:

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You’re looking at the first of seven pages of special Find the characters, the ‘General punctuation’ page, and you can character you scroll through it to look at the characters it contains. Using want to inser t… the panel below the characters 2 , you can click your way to the other six pages, ‘Currency symbols’, ‘Latin symbols’, ‘Geometric symbols’ and so on. At the far-left of this panel, the clock icon takes you to a page listing characters you’ve used before, giving you a quick way to reuse symbols after you’ve been using this panel for a while. When you find the character you want to use in your …and click it document, just click it and it should appear there. You can then either close this panel by pressing the Esc key or keep looking for other symbols and insert those in the same way. This just one little wrinkle to this: some programs don’t work It behaves quite as neatly with this panel (Microsoft Word is one differently with example). If you’ve clicked a character in this panel and it some programs doesn’t appear in your document, have a look at the extreme top-left corner of your screen and you’ll see a tiny text box with a green arrow-button, and the character you just chose will appear in the text box. If you want to insert more characters, keeping finding and clicking them and they’ll be added to this little text box too. When you’re finally ready to insert them into your document, click the green arrow- button: the characters are slotted into your document and these other little panels disappear.

Include emojis in your text We skipped past this a moment ago, but when you press Use emojis on + . you first arrive at Windows 10’s emojis panel. If you your PC use a smartphone, these are probably things you’re familiar with: you can sprinkle your text messages with little pictures such as smiling (or grimacing) faces, hearts, birthday cakes

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– almost anything you can imagine. With the arrival of this panel in Windows 10, you can use them on your PC too. Look through Once again, the emojis are divided into groups and you use the group s… the panel at the bottom to look at the various groups. And again, the clock icon leads to emojis you’ve used recently. As with the symbols we were using just now, you simply click an emoji to slot it into the text you’re typing. …or type a One extra benefit of emojis is that you can search. Simply word to search start typing a word that describes the emoji you want, such as ‘cake’ or ‘dog’ or ‘smile’, and the panel will change to show only those emojis which match. You can then click the one you want to use, and the word you just typed into your document will be replaced by your chosen emoji.

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