Accented Letters in Word

Accented Letters in Word: a reader asks…

Not often, but every once in a while, I have to type a word (using Word) that’s in another language, like French, German, or Spanish. I’m not trying to translate anything, but I do want to have those special letters like the o with two dots over it, or an eyebrow over an a or e. I know the menu system has a Symbols toolbox, but it has a very long list of characters, and I haven’t been able to find the special letters I need. Can you tell me how to get these on my Windows PC using Word?

Whether you’re using Microsoft Word or any other app where you can type in text, the Symbols tool is available for you to choose and insert one of these special letters. Here’s how to get to them quickly using the Symbols tool, but read further down for two even faster ways to get those letters. Here are the three methods most commonly used to generate these special letters:

First, use the Symbols tool, but first note the font you’re using in your app. Then open the Symbols tool (usually Symbol > More Symbols, in your Word or editing app’s Insert menu). That displays the special characters and letters dialogue box. There are two drop-down fields labeled “Font” and “Subset”:

1. In the Font field, choose the font you’re using in your app. Click the caret on the right side of that field to open the drop-down list, scroll until you see the font, then click it. If the Font field already has “(normal text)” in it, you can skip this step.
2. In the Subset field, open the drop-down list and select “Latin-1 Supplement”. This takes you to the section that includes the types of characters you want to use.

Then scroll down that list of characters and letters (scrolling once should do it, you’ll need to use the scrolling bar on the right side) until you see the character you want. Click that character to select it, and click the Insert button. One nice feature is that below the list of characters and letters is a section labeled “Recently used symbols”, and the one you just inserted will show up there, so you don’t have to search the next time you need it.

Second, there is a faster way to get these special characters, but you have to learn and memorize some keyboard shortcuts. You can print this article out, or copy the instructions below and paste them into a Sticky Note (another helpful app in Windows), which you can leave displayed on your desktop for quick reference.

Starting with your cursor in the position where you want the special letter, but before you type the letter, press the keyboard shortcut keys simultaneously and then release them, then type the letter you want to use. Here are the keyboard shortcuts:

To generate an umlaut (the two dots, e.g., ö), the keyboard shortcut is:

Ctrl, Shift and the colon key (usually to the right of the letter L key)

To generate an accent slash (the ‘eyebrow’, usually over the letters a or e), here are three common types:

• Acute accent (slash goes up to the right) e.g., é
• Grave accent (slash goes up to the left) e.g., è
• Circumflex accent (slash goes up and down) e.g., â

For each of these, the keyboard shortcut is:

Ctrl and the apostrophe key (‘ usually next to the Enter key) for an acute accent (examples á or é),

Ctrl and the grave key (` usually above the Tab key) for a grave accent (examples à or è), or

Ctrl, Shift, 6 (the number key) for a circumflex accent (examples â or ê).

There are more of these types of special letters, but these are the most common. If you want something different, you can either use the Symbols tool, or do an internet search for what you want.

You didn’t mention the tilde (~) which is common in Spanish. That keyboard shortcut is (logically):

Ctrl, Shift, Tilde (the same key above the Tab key as the grave accent) (examples ã or ñ).

These keyboard shortcuts work great, but you have to memorize them. As long as you’re into memorizing…

Third, there is another, faster way to type these special letters with accents; however, it only works if you have a dedicated number keypad on your keyboard. With your num lock on (so numbers are typed): hold down the Alt key while you type a 3-digit number on the number keypad. For example, Alt and 0241 give you the lowercase letter n with a tilde (ñ).

For that, you need a table of Alt codes, and here is a graphic for the three languages you mentioned. Click to view it larger, and then use your right-mouse button and click on that enlarged image to save a copy to your computer.

You can also do an internet search for “typing letters with accents on Windows keyboard” and select ‘images’ for the search results; there are lots of tables for various non-English languages.

Lastly, in Windows, you could also add keyboard layouts for those other languages, but since you only use them occasionally, it’s not worth setting up and using alternative keyboards, much less switching between them. I’m including that here just to be thorough. One of the above three methods should work best for you.