Helpful writing characters
Have you ever been frustrated about putting a special character into a Word document or email? Well fear not! Below is a short list of the characters I use often –really– and what keys to type on your keyboard to get them to appear in your document.
Of course, there are a number of ways to insert these characters and this is only one.
Press and hold the ALT key and then enter the four (4) numbers from the keypad. Yes, even the zero must be entered and it doesn’t work with the number keys above the letters!
– Dash Alt + 0150
— Long dash Alt + 0151
© Copyright Alt + 0169
± Plus / Minus Alt + 0177
° Degree Alt + 0176
µ Micro Alt + 0181
The last character, below, is “new”, well sort of, and is used when a sentence is both a question and an exclamation. It is called and interrobang and you can hear about its usage from the grammar girl podcast, but it is non standard and shouldn’t be used in formal documents. http://www.answers.com/topic/interrobang
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ Home
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/punctuating-questions.aspx learn about the Interrobang
Interrobang is located in Wingdings2
Do you have a special character you want to use but can’t find it? There are other useful characters that can be placed into your docs easily by using “insert symbol” and changing the font in the dropdown box. Wingdings are especially designed for such occasions.
To insert many other characters in a different way, you can easily go to the “Insert” menu and select “Symbol…” or go to the character map buried deep in your start menu –somewhere around or in “accessories”
Peace
Portion of the insert symbol dialog