Typing special characters in Windows applications using ANSI codes

If you find you often need to type accented letters or special symbols on your Windows PC but don’t want the hassle of finding them in Word’s Symbols panel or using Unicode, you may want to learn about ANSI codes. These provide an easy way to type a fairly large nummber of useful symmbols and most of the acccents you’re likely to need. The trouble is, you either have to memorise the codes or keep looking them up – and looking them up is harder than it needs to be, because

• most tables contain many codes you’ll never need (including all the codes for everything you can type directly)
• the symbols aren’t grouped at all logically but in the numerical order of the codes.

So I created my own table, listing just the codes I thought I might use and grouping them in a way that seemed logical.

To type any symbol in this table hold down the Alt key and then type, on the numeric keypad, a zero followed by the ANSI code in the column immediately to the right of the symbol. For example, to type é you hold down the Alt key and then type 0233 on the numeric keypad. (However, you may want to check out this Warning before using these codes.)

Warning. Be warned that you need to exercise care with this method of typing special characters. When you type an ‘Alt code’ on a Windows PC, you will see the corresponding character listed above only if you have the right ‘ANSI code page’. For most systems in used in English-speaking countries, the ANSI code page is Windows-1252, and this is what you need to use the above table.