How to type special characters on a Windows PC

This is the situation: you are typing a work report and, suddenly, you need to write the phrase “Jones née Berkowitz”. Or you are adding a sentence in Spanish and you need to use the word “años”. How do you add special characters to letters?

Special characters (also known as diacritical marks) may be more common in some languages, but there are many 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 these marks to documents, emails or other writings. It is not difficult to add them to your Windows document, although it is not as easy an operation as on a Mac, where all you have to do is hold down the appropriate key. (In fact, once, you would have to look up the symbol character codes …)

Use the touch keyboard

The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows touch keyboard. (Thanks to Ed Bott de ZDNet to first lead me to this method.) The touch keyboard appears automatically if you are using a Windows tablet or if you are using a PC in tablet mode. If you don’t have a touchscreen, you can use the keyboard icon that appears on the taskbar, on the right side next to the date. Can’t you see? This is how you get:

• Right-click on the taskbar.
• Click “Show touch keyboard button”.

Now, when you want to use a special character:

• Click on the touch keyboard icon.
• The touch keyboard will appear. Press and hold (with the mouse button or, if you have a touchscreen, your finger) the letter you want to use.
• You will now see several extra keys showing the ways to type that letter with different symbols. Select what you want and it will appear in your document.
• If you want to insert an emoji, click on the emoji key (to the left of the “space bar”).

Use the character map

If you want to try an older 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 10 system:

• Type “character” in the search field and select the Character Map application.
• You will see a pop-up map showing several special characters for a specific font. You can change the font by clicking on the font drop-down menu at the top.

• Click on the letter (s) or special characters you want to use in your document and click on the “Select” button. They will appear in the “Characters to be copied” field.
• After selecting all the characters you want, click on the “Copy” button and paste the character (s) into your document.