Typing Symbols question....

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brad
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Brad

When I hit the asterisk for example, another symbol shows up in my document.
If I type an exclamation point, the percentage symbol shows up. Is there a
way I can correct this?
 
Verify that you have the correct keyboard layout (input language) selected
in Windows Control Panel (Regional Options):
 
Sounds like you've switched to a different (software) keyboard.
LeftAlt-Shift toggles/cycles through all the keyboards that happen to
be installed; or you can remove any keyboards you know you'll never
have any use for. You do that in Start > Control Panel > Regional and
Language Options (what happens next depends on whether you're in
Windows XP or Vista, but the labels are fairly clear).

Or, you have one of those laptops that has a button somewhere for
switching between, say, an ordinary keyboard and an International
keyboard. In that case they often put two symbols on the keys
affected, in different colors.
 
I have been having the same problem with my new Dell PC with VISTA and Office
2007. I keep getting french letters with accents where my keys say symbols.
I checked my keyboard and languages settings. With English (Canada)
Multiliingual Standard I get capital french letters. With English (Canada)
US I get lower case french letters, even though the preview shows otherwise.
Please help!
 
Not sure what lower case french vs. english letters would be ... does
one or the other of those use the French AZERTY keyboard? Are they
assuming that Canadians need to be able to type the French accents
without going to Ctrl- combinations? If you use English (US) or
English (UK) it should behave like a regular English typewriter, and
you'll be using the respective spelling dictionary (for color/colour,
etc.).
 
Here is what I have now:

English (Canada) – Canadian Multilingual Standard

/1234567890-= - Top Row no shift
\!@#$%?&*()_+ - Top Row shift
^ÇÀ - 3 keys right of P no shift
¨çà - 3 keys right of P shift
;è - 2 keys right of L no shift
:È - 2 keys right of L shift
,.é - 3 keys right of M no shift
‘â€Ã‰ - 3 keys right of M shift

No Question Mark key at all. No forward slash at bottom right (only at top
left)

I have similar problems with English US and English UK.

I cannot get the keyboard to behave like a typewriter.

Please advise. I appreciate your help but am ready to throw something.
Typing for 35 years and now this - unbelievably frustrating. Anywhere else I
can turnÉ (that E would be my question mark!!!!)
 
You've chosen to use a keyboard called "Multilingual," so that's what
you've got.

The question mark is on the 6.

Looks like what you've given up to get the French letters is the
brackets, the braces, greater/less, pipe, tilde, and grave accent.
 
If you looks in Control Panel->Regional and Language Options->Keyboards
and languages->Change keyboards... (leading to the Text Services and
Input Languages dialog box), what you should see in the lower box is a
list of the languages you want support for, and under each language, a
list of the "logical" keyboard layouts you want to use when typing that
language.

If you enable the language toolbar in the Text Services and Input
Languages->Language bar option, you should see an icon for the
"language" (say EN or FR) and a keyboard icon that lets you select
between the keyboards that are defined for that language.

If you point to a blank area in your Word document, and click the
language icon you want, you /may/ see that the status bar at the bottom
of Word shows a change. Then ensure that you click the keyboard icon on
the language toolbar and select the keyboard you want to use (which, to
avoid the problems you see, will be an English one). Then try typing on
those character to the right of p,l and m.

It doesn't /always/ seem to work that way, but that's roughly speaking
what happens here.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
 
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