It’s not often, but there might be times when you want to type special characters. While your keyboard has some special characters, such as square brackets, curly braces, parentheses, percentage & currency symbols, and punctuation marks—it doesn’t have every special character. For example, you might want to type the degree symbol, copyright symbol, em dash character, a currency symbol not available on your keyboard, etc.
Fortunately, Windows has a built-in app called “Character Map” that lets you copy and type any special character you need. In this tutorial, I’ll show you the steps to type special characters on Windows 11 and Windows 10. Let’s get started.
Before You Begin
- The steps shown in this tutorial are tested to work on Windows 11 and Windows 10.
Steps To Type Special Characters on Windows 11 & 10
We will use the built-in Character Map tool in Windows to type special characters. Here’s how.
- Open the “Start” menu.
- Search and open “Character Map“
- Find the special character you want.
- Double-click on the character.
- Click the “Copy” button.
- Go to the document where you want to type the special character.
- Paste the copied special character in the document using “Ctrl + V“.
- With that, you’ve typed a special character on Windows.
Detailed Steps (With Screenshots)
First, you must open the Character Map tool. To do that, press the Windows key on your keyboard, type “Character Map” in the Start menu search bar, and click the “Open” option.
In the Character Map window, you will see a massive grid of special characters you can use. Find the special character of your choice and double-click it to select.
Once selected, you should see it in the “Characters to copy” field. Now, click the “Copy” button. This action copies the selected character to your clipboard.
If you cannot find the character you are looking for, use the included search functionality. To do that, type the character name you want to type in the “Search for” field and press the “Enter” button. In my case, I want to find the “Copyright” symbol. So, I typed “copyright” in the search field.
As soon as you do that, you will see it filtered, if it exists, in the Character Map window. Once you see it, double-click it and click the “Copy” button.
After copying the character, you can paste it into any document, form, or field by pressing the “Ctrl + V” keyboard shortcut.
That’s it. It is that simple to use special characters on Windows.
Wrapping Up — Typing Special Characters on Windows
As you can see, thanks to the built-in Character Map tool, it is a fairly simple task to type special characters and symbols. Remember that if you cannot find a specific character right away, use the included search bar at the bottom of the Character Map too. It makes your life much easier. Alternatively, if your main use case is using accented characters such as ñ, á, è, etc., you can use the PowerToys to type accented characters using your keyboard.
If you have any questions or need help, comment below. I’ll be happy to help.
