Hello, my name is Erin.
My blog at erinwrightwriting.com is all about
helping you write effective business and
non-fiction content. Today's tutorial
demonstrates how to insert special
characters in Microsoft Word using the
Symbol dialog box, keyboard shortcuts, and AutoCorrect.
Word includes 27 special characters:
12 text characters, such as the en dash,
that don't appear on traditional keyboards,
and 15 formatting characters,
such as the non-breaking hyphen,
that effect text layout.
If you'd like more information about special characters,
please visit my blog post
titled "What Are Special Characters in Microsoft Word" linked below.
Please note that this tutorial is for Word 2016.
However, the steps are similar for Word 2013 and word 2010
All 27 characters can be inserted using the symbol dialog box.
To begin, place your cursor where the special character should be inserted
And then select the Insert tab.
Now select symbols in the Symbols group followed by More Symbols in the drop-down menu.
In the Symbol dialog box, select the Special Characters tab.
Here you'll find all of the special characters.
Choose the one that you need and then select the Insert button.
When you're done, select the Close button.
If the symbol dialog box is blocking your
view of your newly inserted special character,
left click your mouse arrow on the
uppermost area of the dialog box to grab it
and then move it to a different
location on your screen.
13 special characters can be inserted
with preset keyboard shortcuts.
Please note that the shortcuts shown in
this tutorial for the double opening quote
and double closing quote are
different than those shown in Word's
Symbol dialog box, which are difficult to
use as presented in the software.
You can find all of these shortcuts written in
the tutorial's corresponding blog post link below.
To begin place your cursor where the special character should be inserted
and then select the appropriate key combination.
for this example we'll insert the em dash which is alt + ctrl +
the minus sign in the number pad.
And here are the other presets shortcuts:
You can create a custom keyboard
shortcut for individual special
characters by selecting it in the Symbol dialog box
and then selecting the Shortcut Key button to open the
Customized Keyboard dialog box.
From there, you can edit an existing shortcut
or create a new one.
Word's preset AutoCorrect feature lets you insert the
copyright symbol, trademark symbol,
registered symbol, and en dash by typing
specific character strings into your text.
to insert the trademark,
type an opening parenthesis, lowercase t,
lowercase m, and a closing parenthesis.
To insert the copyright symbol,
type an opening parenthesis lowercase c
and a closing parenthesis.
To insert the registered symbol, type an opening parenthesis,
lowercase r and a closing parenthesis.
And to insert an en dash,
type two hyphens. Note that the en dash won't
appear automatically until you complete
the next word or character string and then press the spacebar.
You can select Control Z to reject an auto corrected character.
You can also customize Word's
AutoCorrect options in the Proofing
section of the Word Options dialog box.
You can find this tutorial in written
format on my blog at erinwrightwriting.com,
which is linked below.
Feel free to leave me a comment if you have a
question about Microsoft Word or Adobe
Acrobat that you'd like me to address in
a future video, and please subscribe and
give this video a thumbs-up if you found
it helpful. Thank you so much for watching!