Microsoft Weekly

Enter special characters with or without keyboard shortcuts

By Ed Bott

The Character Map tool has been a part of Windows for decades. Its role is simple: It allows you to find special characters, not available on a standard keyboard layout, and enter them anywhere that accepts typed text.

To open Character Map, enter its command, Charmap, in the search box and then press Enter. The resulting app displays 200 characters at a time, in 10 rows of 20 characters each. You can visually scan through the list or click the Advanced View checkbox and use its search tools to find a specific character.

Every character has a descriptive name, making searches easy. For example, say you're looking for an inverted question mark for use in a document written in Spanish using an English keyboard. Type ques in the Search For box and then click Search to show a handful of results, including the Inverted Question Mark character.

Best of all, Character Map also offers a cheat sheet for keyboard shortcuts. Just look in the lower-right corner for the matching combination, which you'll enter by holding down the Alt key as you type numbers using the numeric keypad. If you regularly type in Spanish, use Alt+0161 and Alt+1091, respectively, for the Inverted Exclamation Point and Inverted Question Mark characters.

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