

Long press (with your mouse button or, if you have a touchscreen, your finger) on the letter you want to use Now, when you want to use a special character:

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. (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 if you’re using a PC in tablet mode. The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows touch keyboard. (In fact, once upon a time, you would have had to look up the symbol character codes.) Use the touch keyboard 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.
WORD FOR TYPING LETTERS HOW TO
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. 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. 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?
