Spanish punctuation on the computer

[Jim]

I am fluent in Spanish but up to a week ago had no idea how to make Spanish accents or punctuation in word processing or E-mail programs.

á is alt 0225
é 0233
í 0237
ó 0243
ñ 0241
¿ 0191
¡ 0161

Always press alt and hold it while punching the numbers. Release alt and the letter appears.

Peace,

Jim

I've been aware of the alt codes for a while, but never felt it worth the bother to commit them to memory. If you're working on your own computer, Windows easily lets you reset it to International English. That way typing an apostrophe before a letter gives you a accent (como así), typing a tilde before n gives you ñ, and typing a double-quote before a letter gives you an umlaut (como en la palabra bilingüe). When I get to an Internet cafe outside the US, then it's a whole different ballgame. Often hitting what I think should be an apostrophe gives me a written accent, and I have trouble remembering how to form an apostrophe on those keyboards. Also, it seems one often has to use "alt-something" to get an @. That's an important one if the point of visiting the cafe is to email home.

Another way to do it is to go into "keyboards" and "languages" on "my computer" and add a Spanish keyboard but leaving English as your default language. That gives you an icon at the bottom of your screen and whenever you want to write in Spanish you just click it to switch to the Spanish keyboard. It takes a little time to learn the keyboard but I think it would be easier than learning all those codes.