Accessing foreign characters.

[Guest]

I'm new to Powerpoint & would like to use text-only slides for teaching an
obscure foreign language. I need 8 new characters in addition to the full
QWERTY set. All are available in the Symbol font. I have written 8 short
macros to pick out the characters, but must select them via a toolbar. This
causes fatique because they occur very often. Is there no way in PP for these
macros to be run by keypress (say Ctrl+Alt+ an Alphakey)?

Any other suggestions will be gratefully received.
Many thanks,

Robert.

 

[Guest]

I have been facing the same problem making slides in Polish, which uses a few
additional characters, all accessible in Latin-2. My solution was to type my
text in Word, where I assigned shortcut keys to all needed letters. Then, I
just copied it form Word and pasted to Power Point. It is still cumbersome
but, perhaps, it could serve as a temporary solution until someone advises
how to do it better. I will think about it too.

JanAdam

 

[Sonia]

Within PowerPoint you can set them up under Tools > AutoCorrect Options >
AutoCorrect as replacement pairs.
--

Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
http://www.soniacoleman.com

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I'm new to Powerpoint & would like to use text-only slides for teaching an
obscure foreign language. I need 8 new characters in addition to the full
QWERTY set. All are available in the Symbol font. I have written 8 short
macros to pick out the characters, but must select them via a toolbar. This
causes fatique because they occur very often. Is there no way in PP for these
macros to be run by keypress (say Ctrl+Alt+ an Alphakey)?

As has been mentioned, AutoCorrect is one way.
Another is to see if the needed characters are available in a common text font
(so you don't have to switch to Symbol). Open the Character Map app and look
for a font that contains the needed symbols and note the ALT+nnnn number
sequence needed to type the character.

If you know those, all you need to do is type ALT+nnnn (on the numeric keypad)
to insert the character.

Or type a placeholder ... !p for Pi, for example ... then later go back and use
PPT's Edit, Replace command to replace all !p with whatever the ALT+nnnn combo
is

 

[Guest]

Sonia,

This is a good hint, thanks. However (there always has to be a glitch): I
can map say \L to Å and it displays Å correctly only if \L is immediately
followed by a space. If I type, say, \Lopataspace (Åopata is a shovel in
Polish) for whatever reasons it stays \Lopata.

JanAdam

 

[Sonia]

That is true. Therefore you must type /L backspace o p a t a. If you had a
Polish keyboard this wouldn't be required.