Helpdesk Baruch College

How to Type Accent Marks Over Letters in Microsoft Word

If you do not have a specialized keyboard, you need to do a little extra work to type letters with accent marks in Microsoft Word. Here are a couple of ways to get it done.

If you type regularly in a language aside from English, you probably have this all exercised already. Possibly you even use a specialized keyboard that makes typing letters with accent marks easier. But if you’re typing primarily in English, there are still times you may need to type an accented letter. English utilizes numerous words obtained from other languages– like déjà vu, jalapeño, doppelgänger, and résumé. And while we typically simply type those words without accents in English, in some cases it’s nice to take the more formal method. In the cases where you do, Microsoft Word supplies a couple of easy methods to make it take place.

Place Accented Letters with Word’s Insert Function

If you just need to place accented characters periodically, it’s easy enough to pop open Word’s Symbol window and hunt for the letter you need.

Switch over to the “Insert” tab, and after that click the “Symbol” button.

The dropdown menu shows your most recently-used signs. If the sign you’re after is there, just click it. If not, click the “More Symbols” command, rather.

The Symbol window that opens displays a huge number of characters to pick from– 3,633 to be specific. Word does help by letting you filter by font style and subset, though.

Utilize the “Font” dropdown menu to choose the font style you’re using (or, you can just choose the “Normal Text” entry). The “Subset” dropdown lets you jump to specific subsets of characters. In truth, if you scroll through the readily available characters, you can see the Subset value change. In the meantime, though, go ahead and select “Latin-1 Supplement” from the “Subset” dropdown. That’s where you’ll likely discover the accented letter you’re after.

Click the character you’re looking for, and then click the “Insert” button to place it into your document. Keep in mind while you’re here that there are all sort of other helpful signs in this window. Simply in the image below, you can see the signs for copyright ( ©) and registered hallmark ( ®).

Pretty easy, ideal? However, what if you need to insert some signs pretty frequently and don’t wish to open and search that Symbol window whenever? Well, we have a number of techniques to reveal you.

Insert Accented Letters with Keyboard Shortcuts

Word has great deals of great keyboard shortcuts, and shortcuts for accented characters are no exception. You might have discovered previously back at the “More Symbols” screen that Word actually informs you what the shortcut key is for that character.

And the best part is that these faster ways follow a kind of formula, so you don’t necessarily have to memorize them all. You’ll use the Ctrl or Shift key in addition to the accent key on your keyboard, followed by a fast press of the letter.

For example, to get the á character, you ‘d press Ctrl+’ (apostrophe), release those secrets, and then rapidly push the A key. Note that if you want Á instead of á, you ‘d need to make it possible for caps lock in the past utilizing the shortcut key, considering that using the Shift key would alter the faster way.

There are too many to list in this post, however here are a few shortcut keys provided by Office Support to get you began.

Place Accented Characters with ASCII Codes

And what use would we be if we didn’t reveal you the geekiest method of all? If you’re going to be utilizing a lot of accented characters– particularly the same characters over and over– it may be worth your time to find out a couple of ASCII codes.

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), is an encoding system that supplies a way to represent particular characters using the respective code. We will not be going over the complete list of ASCII codes, as there are hundreds of characters and it’s difficult to learn them all. Rather, we’ll go through the basics and provide you a couple of short codes to rapidly look after those foreign words with diacritics.

To use this technique, you’ll require a number pad (either as part of your primary keyboard or as an add-on). You’ll likewise need to ensure you’ve enabled NumLock by pressing the NumLock key at the top-left corner of your number pad. Most keyboards have a sign light to let you know when NumLock is made it possible for.

To enter an ASCII code, all you need to do is hold down your Alt key while typing out a numeric code on your number pad. The code for a lowercase letter “a” with a serious accent is 133. So, you ‘d hold down Alt, type 133, and after that let go of the Alt key. As quickly as you do, the character appears– voilà!

Undoubtedly, it would be tough to keep in mind a lots of ASCII codes for different accented letters, however if you routinely use a few, it truly simplifies the entire procedure. Here are a couple of to get you started:

AutoCorrect Keyboard Characters to Special Characters

You can also use Word’s autocorrect function to immediately place accented characters when you type particular letter mixes. And, although this sounds like it would be the easiest method, it’s eccentric and in practice, not as helpful as it might sound.

Back at the Symbols window, pick the character for which you wish to establish an autocorrect function for. Click the “AutoCorrect” button at the bottom left.

In the “Replace” box, type the characters that you want to trigger the autocorrect replacement. When you’re done, click the “Add” button, and after that the “OKAY” button.

In this case, we’re informing Word that when we type the letter “a” followed by the accent tomb (‘) and after that an area, Word needs to immediately replace that with an “a” that has the accent tomb above it.

And now, for that quirkiness we promised you.

When you type a word, you have to type the accented character first. To put it simply, if you wish to type “Voilà,” you ‘d initially need to type a+’ then go back and type the “Viol” behind it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with Viola’– due to the fact that Word will not trigger the autocorrect when the trigger letters are part of a bigger word. And, as you can envision, this makes it really irritating if you have multiple accented characters in a single word.

And actually, you’re still doing practically as much typing as you would using the integrated in keyboard shortcuts Word provides.

Word has lots of excellent keyboard shortcuts, and shortcuts for accented characters are no exception. You can likewise utilize Word’s autocorrect feature to immediately insert accented characters when you type certain letter combinations. When you type a word, you have to type the accented character. In other words, if you want to type “Voilà,” you ‘d first require to type a+’ then go back and type the “Viol” behind it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with Viola’– because Word won’t trigger the autocorrect when the trigger letters are part of a bigger word.

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