How to Type Letters with Accents and Special Characters in Microsoft Windows if You Live in the U.S.

by Rob Locher

All common European special characters
Characters used in French
Characters used in Spanish
Characters used in German

Many people don't know it, but it has long been possible to enter special characters that aren't on any key on your keyboard into almost any Windows program.  This includes letters with accents, so if you like you can type "résumé", or write that paper for your foreign-language class.

There are actually several ways of doing this.  One way is with the Character Map utility that comes with Windows, and may already be installed on your computer.  This copies the special character you select into the Windows clipboard so that you can paste it into whatever program you are running.  The disadvantages of the Character Map utility are that you must choose a font, and that it is disruptive because you have to interrupt what you are doing to use it.  The best advantage of the utility is that it allows you to use any special character from any font installed on your computer, including the weird symbols in fonts that exist only to host weird symbols, such as the Wingdings font.

The quickest way to enter one quick special character or letter with an accent is with a trick that has been around for a long time.  To use it, you hold down the "Alt" key, type a four-digit number starting with zero on the number pad (not on the number keys above the letters), and then let go of the "Alt" key.  (It doesn't matter if you have "Num Lock" on or not.)  For example, to type the cent symbol "¢", hold down "Alt", type 0162 on the number pad, and then let go of "Alt".  This is written as "Alt+0162".  See the tables below.  This technique works pretty well for the occasional special character, especially if you memorize your favorites.  It allows you to access all the special characters except the weird ones in the special fonts.  (Note to programmers: Alt+0xxx picks a character from the character set selected by Windows, normally "ISO Latin-1"; Alt+xxx also selects a character, but from the "OEM" character set from DOS, which is deprecated.  The two character sets are the same for the common ASCII characters but are otherwise different.)

If you are writing in a foreign language, and not just typing one or two words, then it quickly becomes very tedious to look up and type the four-digit number of every character with an accent.  Of course, speakers of foreign languages don't put up with typing the four-digit number every time, and you don't have to either.  The best solution to typing lots of text in a foreign language is to load a different keyboard driver.  (A driver is a software program that is part of the operating system.)  The only difference between a keyboard in France and a keyboard in the United States, besides the labels on the keys, is the keyboard driver loaded on the computer.  The French keyboard driver knows that if you type "^" and then "o", you want "ô".  Believe it or not, but your U.S. edition of Windows has not only the "US" keyboard driver on the CD, but the "French (France)" keyboard driver too.  So if you wanted, you could use the French keyboard driver.  The disadvantage of this technique is that the French keyboard driver switches the Q and A keys, which is very distracting if you learned to type in the U.S., and only works with accents that are used in French, which is no good if you are crazy enough to study French and German in the same semester.  Fortunately, some wise person at Microsoft invented the "United States-International" keyboard driver, which lets you type accented characters for nearly every western European language, but still has the keys laid out as people in the United States expect.  Unfortunately somebody else at Microsoft was in charge of making the documentation for the driver easy to find; you can find it here, or look in the tables below.

To switch keyboard drivers in Windows, open the Control Panel, double-click on the Keyboard icon, and click on the "Input Locales" tab.  You may need to have your Windows CD-ROM disk handy the first time.  More recent versions of Windows make it easy to quickly switch between keyboard drivers via an icon in the taskbar or a keyboard "hot key" combination; in older versions, you have to go through the Control Panel when you want to switch.

If you are using a different keyboard driver, to type an accented character you usually type the accent first and then the character.  To type "é" in the "United States-International" keyboard driver, first type the accent (which is the apostrophe " ' " on the key next to the semicolon key) and then the "e".  With the "United States-International" keyboard driver, some characters, e.g. "¡", are typed by typing the right "Alt" key first and then the second key.  To type the accent character by itself, type the accent and then a space.  The Alt+0xxx trick also works with the "United States-International" keyboard driver, which is good because there aren't key combinations for all the special characters.

By the way, the "United States-International" keyboard driver and the Alt+0xxx keyboard trick only work with the common European accented characters and common special characters used in the U.S.  To be specific, they only work on characters 128-255 of the Windows-1252 character set.  (That's not the same as ASCII; ASCII is a seven-bit code, so the ASCII character set is only from 0 to 127.)  To type characters used in non-European languages such as Japanese, a different keyboard driver is required and the Alt+0xxx trick doesn't work.