Word to the wise: Inserting symbols

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Today, we have a guest blogger. Elyssa is an editor and project manager at Brainstorm, a leading provider of online and onsite software training and one of our partners that provides customized content for your Productivity Hub.

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When you're writing marketing text or memos, you may need to insert a symbol not located on your keyboard into your work. Many business documents call for the use of the copyright symbol (©), the registered symbol (®), or the trademark symbol (™). You can easily insert these and dozens of other symbols or characters into a Word 2007 document. Some symbols can even work as graphic elements on a page.

And if you use the same symbol often, you can use keyboard shortcuts to insert them into a document quickly.

To insert a symbol, follow these steps:

1. On the Ribbon, click the Insert tab and find the Symbols command group.

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2. Click the Symbol button to see a menu of recently used symbols.

3. Click the symbol you want to insert. It will appear in the document at the insertion point.

4. If the symbol you need isn't among the recently used symbols, click More Symbols to see additional choices. The Symbol dialog box appears.

5. In the Symbol dialog box, you can choose the Symbols tab or the Special Characters tab. Special characters comprise mostly punctuation marks such as EM dash but also include the copyright, registered, and trademark symbols.

6. Click the symbol or character you want to insert.

7. Click Insert to place the item in the document at your insertion point.

8. If you will use this symbol frequently, click Shortcut Key. The Customize Keyboard dialog box appears.

9. In the Customize Keyboard dialog box, you will see the shortcut key sequence for the symbol. For example, the keyboard shortcut for the copyright symbol is ALT+CTRL+C; the symbol is inserted in your document when you press this key combination. If the symbol you use frequently has no shortcut key assigned, you can create your own in the Press New Shortcut Key field. Then click Close to save your key assignment.

The shortcut keys for commonly used symbols will save you a great deal of time. Watch a free, short training video on this topic by BrainStorm.

Elyssa