You have a keyboard. You have Word. How do you get those accented characters even though they don’t appear on the keyboard?

Accents just don’t grow themselves. You must place them over existing characters. The candidates? Vowels!

A E I O U

The key to getting accents over characters is to know the prefix keys. You type a prefix key, then type the character. The two merge and — voilà — you get accents.

The prefix keys in Word generally match up with the accent you want:

Ctrl+` (the accent grave) gives you a backtick accent: à è ì ò ù

Ctrl+’ (apostrophe) gives you a forward tick accent: á é í ó ú

Ctrl+Shift+: (colon) gives you an umlaut: ä ë ï ö ü

So when you want an accent, you type the prefix key, Ctrl+’ and then the vowel. Simple to do, easy to forget.

Of course, there is a viable alternative: The Symbol command. You can use the Symbol dialog box to look up hundreds of characters that can be inserted into the document. That’s not as handy as using the prefix keys, but it works.

Well, and it’s all better than having a keyboard with 10,000 keys on it.