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You just have to know how to do it
Here’s the situation: you’re typing a report for work, and you suddenly have to write the phrase “Jones née Berkowitz.” Or you are adding a phrase in Spanish and need to use the word “años.” How do you add the special characters to the letters with your Windows 11 PC?
Special characters (also known as diacritical marks) may be more common in certain languages, but there are plenty of circumstances in which English speakers may need to use them. But because they are so rare in English, native English speakers may not have learned how to add those marks to documents, emails, or other writings. It’s not difficult to add them to your Windows document, although it’s not quite as smooth an operation as on a Mac, where all you have to do is hold the appropriate key down. (In fact, once upon a time, you would have had to look up the symbol character codes.)
Here are various ways to add special characters when you’re using a Windows 11 computer.
Related
The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows touch keyboard. (Thanks to Ed Bott from ZDNet for first leading me to this method.) The touch keyboard automatically appears if you’re using a Windows tablet or a PC in tablet mode. If you don’t have a touchscreen, you can use the keyboard icon that appears in the taskbar on the right side near the date. Don’t see it? This is how you get it:
Now, when you want to use a special character:
Another keyboard that you can access and that can let you easily add special characters to your text is Windows’ emoji keyboard. Yes, it is mainly for adding emojis to your text, but it’s got other uses as well. And it’s simple to use.
The emoji keyboard also lets you access special characters.
If you’d like to try a more old-fashioned method of adding special characters to Windows, you can use the character map, which is a less polished and more complicated version of the touch keyboard but offers a similar service.
To access it on your Windows 11 system:
If you’re an English speaker who is multilingual and uses special characters a lot, you may want to try the US International Keyboard, which maps your keyboard to more easily allow you to add special characters. (Thanks to “shiroledat” for the tip.)
First, you need to add the US International Keyboard to Windows:
Now, you always have the choice of using either the standard US keyboard or the US International Keyboard. You can see which one is active in the lower-right side of your taskbar near the date. It will either read ENG / US or ENG / INTL. Click on that (or just hit Windows key+space bar) and a pop-up menu will let you switch from one to the other.
The US International Keyboard gives you two ways to add a special character:
Washington State University has published a useful chart showing all of the symbols you can get using the US International Keyboard.
Remember the character map? If you look at the lower right-hand corner of the character map after you’ve chosen a letter or special character, you’ll see the word Keystroke followed by Alt and a four-digit number. This number represents the Unicode value of the symbol, and it’s the time-honored standard for adding characters.
If you use a few special characters consistently, it can be faster to simply add the character you want using your usual keyboard. There are several ways to do this; here are two of the easiest (each of which has its limitations):
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