How to Type Letters with Accents on the keyboard (+ Alt codes) - How to Type Anything (2024)

An Accent is a diacritical mark used to indicate stress or placed below or above a letter (or a vowel) to indicate a special pronunciation.

Due to improved keyboard controls on devices, typing or putting accents on letters (accented letters) becomes very easy. Whether you are using a desktop (be it Windows or Mac), laptop, or even on mobile devices, you can easily type accents on letters with some cool tricks and techniques you’ll learn about in this article.

There are some specialized keyboards that allow you to type these accented letters easily. Thus, if you don’t use these special Accent keyboards, you’ll need some of the techniques in this article to be able to type any letter with an accent or symbol into your Work on any device.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

How to Type Letters with Accents (On Windows)

There are several approaches to typing or inserting accented letters into Microsoft Windows.

Since these characters are not readily available on the keyboard, using their alt codes is the simplest way to type them on Windows.

In this section, I’ll show you how to type accents in windows using the characters’ alt codes.

Using the Letters with Accents Alt Code

Each letter with an accent has an alt code with which you can use to type it anywhere in Windows, whether in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, in your Browser, and so on. You’ll learn the alt code to all the accented characters in a moment. For now, let’s look at the steps.

To type letters with accents on top, obey the following instruction:

• First of all, know the alt code of the letter with accent you want to type. The alt codes are listed just below these instructions.
• Turn on your Num Lock. Press Fn+NmLk to turn on Num Lock on laptops without the numeric keypad.
• Hold down the Alt key on your keyboard.
• Whilst still holding on to the Alt key, press the character’s alt code.
• For example, to type e with an acute accent (é), press and hold the Alt key, then type the alt code 0233 on the numeric keypad.
• Now release the Alt key.

You should see the accented letter inserted as soon as you release the Alt key.

Below are the alt codes for the various accented letters.

Letters with Acute accents Alt Codes

Letters with Grave accents Alt Codes

Letters with Circumflex accents Alt Codes

Letters with Tilde accents Alt Codes

Letters with Umlaut Accents Alt Codes

Note: Using the alt code approach means that you have a lot to learn. And as we all know, learning these alt codes will take a lot of practice as there are many alt codes to remember. However, you can create a cheat sheet for quick reference if you happen to type accents frequently. If you are using any of the Microsoft Office Apps like Word or Excel, you can reconfigure some hotkeys to better suit your typing needs – We’ll discuss that later in this article.

How to type Accents on Mac

Typing accents on Mac is a lot easier with shortcuts. There are some combinations of keys for typing any accented letter on Mac. Let’s take a look at how to use each of these shortcuts.

Typing Letters with grave accents on Mac

Obey the following steps to type any letter with the grave accent mark on top of it:

• First of all, press [Option]+[`] on your keyboard.

• Then press the letter to be accented.

For example, to type è (e with the grave accent), press and hold [OPTION], then press the [`] grave accent key. Release the two keys and then type [e]. The ‘e’ with grave should be inserted into your work. The same technique can be used to type à, ì, ò and ù.

The [`] mark is called the grave accent and the key for typing this mark is the key on top of the [Tab] key and before the [1] key.

Letters with grave accent shortcuts are listed in the table below:

Typing Letters with acute accents on Mac

Obey the following steps to type any letter with the acute accent mark on top of it:

• First of all, press [Option]+[e] on your keyboard.
• Then press the letter to be accented.

For example, to type é (e with the acute accent), press and hold OPTION, then press the e key. Release the two keys and then type e. The letter é should be inserted for you. The same technique can be used to type á, í, í, ó, ú and ý.

Letters with acute accent shortcuts are listed in the table below:

Typing Letters with circumflex accents on Mac

Obey the following steps to type any letter with the circumflex accent mark on top of it:

• First of all, press [Option]+[i] on your keyboard.
• Then press the letter to be accented.

For example, to type ê (e with the circumflex accent), press and hold the [OPTION] key, then press the [i] key. Release the two keys and then type e. The letter ê should be inserted into your work. The same technique can be used to type â, î, ô and û.

Letters with circumflex accent shortcuts are listed in the table below:

Typing Letters with the tilde accents on Mac

Obey the following steps to type any letter with the tilde accent mark on top of it:

• First of all, press [Option]+[n] on your keyboard.
• Then press the letter to be accented.

For example, to type ã (a with the tilde accent), press and hold the [OPTION] key, then press the [n] key. Release the two keys and then type a. The letter ã should be inserted into your work. The same technique can be used to type ñ and õ.

Letters with tilde accent shortcuts for Mac are listed in the table below:

Letters with umlaut accents on Mac

Obey the following steps to type any letter with the umlaut accent mark on top of it:

• First of all, press [Option]+[u] on your keyboard.
• Then press the letter to be accented.

For example, to type ë (e with the umlaut accent), press and hold the [OPTION] key, then press the [u] key. Release the two keys and then type e. The letter ë should be inserted into your work. The same technique can be used to type ä, ï, ö, ü and ÿ.

Letters with umlaut accent shortcuts are listed in the table below:

These are the easy ways to type letters with accents on top of them on Mac.

How to Type Accents on Letters in Word

In this section, we’ll discuss the various options you can use to type accents in Microsoft Word.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Keyboard shortcuts for typing accents in Word

If you are using Microsoft Word for typing your projects which requires you to frequently type accented letters, you’ll be happy to learn that Word has made typing accents very easy with some combinations of keys.

For example, to type é ( e with acute accent) in Word, press Ctrl+’ (apostrophe), then hit on the letter [e].

This means that Ctrl+’ then [a] gives you á, Ctrl+’ then [u] gives you ú, and so on.

Below is a table of shortcut keys to type accents in Word:

Typing Letters with accents in Word using Alt Codes

One of the easiest ways you can get any accented letter in Word is to use the character’s alt code. All you have to do is to key in the alt code whilst you press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard.

Below are the steps to type any accented letter in Word using the character’s Alt code:

• First of all, identify the alt code of the accented letter you wish to type. In this example, we will type the letter e with an acute accent (é). The Alt code for this letter is 130.

Note: Refer to the first section of this article for a list of alt codes for all the accented letters.

• Press and hold the Alt key and type the alt code of the letter you wish to type. In this example, we are typing é whose alt code is 130. Therefore, whilst holding down the Alt key, press 130 on the numeric keypad at the right-hand side of your keyboard.

This is how you may type accents into Microsoft Word with the help of character codes.

Insert Accents using the Insert symbol’s dialog

This particular method involves a little bit of workaround. But it’s fairly simple. It doesn’t involve using the keyboard though.

And once you get the accented you want into your document; you can always copy and paste it again as and when the need arises.

Obey the following instructions to insert accents in Word using the insert symbol dialog.

• On theInserttab, click theSymbolbutton and chooseMore Symbols…

These few clicks will display the Symbol dialog box. Now it’s time to look for the symbol you want to insert.

• Locate theSymbol

To easily find all the accents in the dialog box, look at the bottom right area of the Symbol dialog box and selectUnicode (hex)in thefrom:drop-down. Then look again at the top right area of the dialog and selectLatin-1 Supplementin theSubset:drop-down.

This will filter out all theletters with accents.

• Select the symbol, then click Insert. Alternatively, double-click on your choice to insert it into your document.

• After inserting, close the Symbol dialog box by clicking on the Cancel button.

This is how you may insert letters with accents in Word using the insert symbol dialog.

How to Type Accents in Excel

There are two simple ways to type accents in Excel. The use of character codes and using the insert symbol’s dialog box.

In this section, I’ll go through these two options one after the other.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Using the insert Symbol’s dialog

The following steps will show you how to insert letters with accents in Excel using the insert symbol’s dialog box.

• Select the cell that will contain the accented letter you wish to insert. If you want the accented letter to come before or after a particular character in a cell, place the insertion pointer right there.
• Click on the Insert tab.

• Click on the Symbols drop down and select Symbol to display the Symbol’s dialog box.

• The Symbols dialog box will appear.
• From this Symbol dialog box, search for the letter with an accent you want and double click it to insert. Alternatively, just select and click on the Insert button at the bottom of the dialog.

• Click on the Cancel button to close the dialog.

This is how you may use the Symbol’s dialog box to insert letters with accents in Excel.

Using alt codes to type accents in Excel

Another easy way to type letters with accents in Excel is to use alt codes. This method will work for you if you are using a Windows PC. If it looks like you, just obey the instructions below:

• First of all, identify the alt code of the accented letter you wish to type. In this example, we will type the letter e with an acute accent (é). The Alt code for this letter is 130.

Note: Refer to the first section of this article for list of alt codes for all the accented letters.

• Now, Select the cell that will contain the letter with an accent.
• Press and hold the Alt key and type the alt code of the accented letter. In this example, we are typing é whose alt code is 130. Therefore, whilst holding down the Alt key, press 130 on the numeric keypad at the right-hand side of your keyboard.
• After typing the code, release the alt key.

This is how you may type accents in Microsoft Excel using alt codes.