Special characters have become a very important tool for most users, especially when we use the Microsoft Office package programs . Whether developing a project in Word or Excel and we need to use them.
In general, these characters are not usually shown on the computer keyboard , but are hidden and must be displayed under a key combination . The “Alt + numeric keypad”, key is usually used to show signs, symbols, letters, numbers , among other characters.
If you are looking to elaborate some type of document and you need to apply some characters like Greek letters, currency symbols , among others. So here we are going to explain what they are, what they are for and how they can insert all these elements in your PC.
Index:
What are the special characters of my computer keyboard?
The special characters can be signs, numbers, letters, symbols , figures of the different currencies of the world, among many others. All of them may be needed at some time in our lives, whether when we are developing a project or document with a specific program.
As mentioned earlier, these are not usually found on the keyboard , that is, they do not appear on a specific key, but we must use a combination of buttons > so that they appear on the screen. In addition, it is important to mention that they are classified according to the language used , where each one varies a little.
In this way, all of this coding system is terminated by the use of text files consisting of characters . This allows them to be represented by the system and that way the team is able to assimilate and display them on the screen.
How are these characters classified? Main coding systems
In the case of the character encoding will depend mainly on the different modes of the language used . This means that this will vary according to the language used . All this needs to be represented in the correct way so that these coding systems can be translated correctly and thus be assimilated by the team.
All this is usually classified as follows:
ASCII System
This ASCII system is the abbreviation of the “Standard American Code for Information Exchange.” This system is based primarily on the Latin alphabet > and currently consists of 128 characters , where only 95 of them are printable.
All this was created for the year 1963 in the English language , this began to create many limitations for what was its use in other languages, since its use is difficult to represent the characters and symbols that were required.
This type of coding consists of all the letters of the alphabet and the numbers from 0 to 9, as well as some special symbols . Among some of the printable characters we can find in ASCII we have the following:
- ! »# $% & ‘() * +, -. / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9:; =? @ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU VWXYZ [] ^ _ `abcdefghijklmnopqrstu vwxyz {| } ~
ISO-8859-1 System
We also found ISO-8859-1, which was created mainly to be able to meet all those needs that ASCII was not capable, since it had some limitations , especially the language that greatly affected its use in Latin America .
With this in mind, ISO-8859-1, is used primarily for the regions of Western Europe, Latin America and North America . Since it became a more practical tool, it uses 8 bits that allows to provide some additional characters that were not used in the English language. These were accents, the letter ñ , among many others.
Unicode
Finally we find the Unicode system . As in the previous case, this was created to finish completing what ASCII and ISO were not able to achieve. As we mentioned earlier, ISO was available for different geographical regions. However, the 8 bits offered were not able to be able to encode the entire alphabet used in the world , so it ended up falling short before requirements.
Therefore, as a solution to all these problems, Unicode and a universal character set (UCS) ISO / IEC 10646 are created. All this ends up assigning a unique code to the more than fifty thousand existing symbols , which allowed the use of a greater number of text characters and symbol coding from different languages. Some of the symbols that can be inserted with Unicode encoding are the following: ☂, ❀ , ✰ , ☠
Steps to learn how to insert each special character into my computer
There are two ways to insert letters and special signs into the computer, this can be through the “Alt + a number” buttons or through the character map . To do this you will simply have to execute the steps that we will explain below:
With Alt and the numeric keypad
The first method we present is about using the keyboard button combination and is commonly used on Windows computers . To be able to insert them you need to follow these steps:
- The first thing will be to make sure that the numeric keypad is activated , this is almost always on the right side of your keyboard. In order to activate them you must press the “Num lock” key, keep in mind that you must first make sure that it is deactivated, but on the contrary when pressing said button we deactivate it.
- Once the numbers are activated, the following will be to press the “Alt” button and not release it.
- Having “Alt” Pressing now press the number keys we need “8” and immediately release the “Alt” key.
- Automatically you will see the symbol or character that you requested with the previous action.
Through this process you can start insert several characters, symbols and signs in your different documents.
With the character map
The character map is a program that is integrated into the Windows operating system and is available for several versions 7, 8 and 10 . It allows you to see all the elements that are available in the selected work source.
In this way, this has become another of the methods available to be able to insert letters, symbols and special signs . In order to execute this you will need to perform these steps:
- To start it you must go to the “Run” or “Start” box, you can also access it by pressing the “Windows + R “.
- When the “Run” window appears on the screen type the following “charmap” and click on ” Accept ” or press equallyEnter•.
- Then a window will appear where you can select those symbols that you need and copy it to the clipboard. This way you can paste it into the program that you need .
Please note that through this map you also have the opportunity to use those symbols that were created with the “Private character editor”.
List of all codes to insert special characters using the ALT key and the numeric keypad
One of the easiest and fastest ways to insert any sign, symbol or letter is through the combination of “Alt + number” buttons. However, to be able to use this method it is necessary to know what the sequences are and what results each one will give us .
It is important that you keep in mind that each of the sequences that we will explain in the following table are available only for the Windows operating system. In this way, here we present the following tables with their key and character combinations .