You can easily insert a check mark (also known as a 'tick mark'), fraction, or other symbol in your Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel workbooks.

The most important thing to understand when inserting symbols, fractions, special characters, or international characters is that the font you use is critical. Not all fonts have the same characters in them, for example the Elephant font has no fraction characters in it while Verdana does. As a result it's important to use the right font to find the symbol or character you want.

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What do you want to insert?

  • Symbol such as currency (¥), music (♫), or check marks (✔)

If you want to use the ASCII or Unicode character codes to insert the characters from the keyboard see: Insert a check mark or other symbol using the keyboard with ASCII or Unicode character codes.

These marks are static symbols. If you're looking for an interactive check box that you can click on to check or uncheck, see: Add a check box or option button (Excel) or Make a checklist in Word.

Symbol such as currency (¥), music (♫), or check marks (✔)

  1. Place your cursor in the file at the spot where you want to insert the symbol.
  2. On the Insert tab, click Symbol.
  3. If you see the symbol you want listed on that gallery, just click it to insert. Otherwise, click More Symbols to open the Symbol dialog box
  4. Scroll up or down to find the symbol you want to insert.
    Different font sets often have different symbols in them and the most commonly used symbols are in the Segoe UI Symbol font set. Use the Font selector above the symbol list to pick the font you want to browse through.
  5. When you find the symbol you want, double-click it. The symbol will be inserted in your file. You can click Close now unless you want to insert additional symbols.
Tip: If you want to make your symbol larger or smaller, select it and use the Font Size setting.

If you're going to insert the same symbol often, consider setting up AutoCorrect to insert it for you. You can find more info about that here: Insert a check mark or other symbol using AutoCorrect.

A special character like em dashes or section marks (§)

  1. Click where you want to insert the special character.
  2. Click Insert > Symbol > More Symbols.
  3. In the Symbol dialog box, click the Special Characters tab.
  4. Double-click the character that you want to insert.
    Tip: Many of the special characters have shortcut keys associated with them. If you want to insert that special character again in the future, just press the shortcut key. ALT+CTRL+C inserts the Copyright symbol (©), for example.
  5. Click Close when you're finished inserting special characters.

Fractions (1/3, 2/5)

Some fractions (1/4, 1/2, and 3/4) automatically switch to a fraction character (¼, ½, ¾) when you type them. But others do not (1/3, 2/3, 1/5, etc.) so if you want to insert those as symbols you'll need to use the insert symbol process.

  1. Click where you want to insert the fraction.
  2. Click Insert > Symbol > More Symbols.
  3. In the Subset dropdown, choose Number Forms.
    Note: Not all fonts have a number forms subset. If you don't see the number forms subset available for your font you will have to use a different font, such as Calibri, to insert the fraction character.
  4. Double-click the fraction that you want to insert.
  5. Click Close.

Only a handful of common fractions have a symbol that you can substitute. For more unusual fractions, such as 8/9, you can approximate the symbol by setting the numerator as superscript and the denominator as subscript. For more information see Insert subscript or superscript text.

International Characters like ¿ or ü

If you plan to type in other languages often you should consider switching your keyboard layout to that language. You can find more information about that at Enable or change a keyboard layout language.

For one-off characters there are almost always keyboard shortcuts in Office to do that. For example:

For the complete guide to using the keyboard to insert international characters see: Keyboard shortcuts for international characters.

Insert a check mark or other symbol using the keyboard with ASCII or Unicode character codes

Anuradha

You can also use the character code of the symbol as a keyboard shortcut. Symbols and special characters are either inserted using ASCII or Unicode codes. You can tell which is which when you look up the code for the character.

  1. Go to the Insert tab of the ribbon and click Symbol > More Symbols just like you were going to insert the symbol using the dialog box.
  2. Scroll up or down the list to find the symbol you want; note that you might have to change the font or the subset to locate it.
    Tip: The Segoe UI Symbol font has a very large collection of Unicode symbols to choose from.
  3. Towards the bottom right you'll see boxes for Character code and a from:. The character code is what you'll enter to insert this symbol from the keyboard and the from: tells you what kind of character it is. If from: says 'Unicode (hex)' it's a Unicode character. If from: says 'Symbol (Decimal)' then it's an ASCII character.

Unicode

ASCII

Inserting Unicode Characters

  1. Type the character code where you want to insert the Unicode symbol.
  2. Press ALT+X to convert the code to the symbol.
Tips:

Inserting ASCII Characters

Notes:
  1. On the Home tab, in the Font group, change the font to Wingdings.
  2. Press and hold the ALT key and type the character code on the numeric keypad. Remember to add any leading zeroes you need to get to four digits of length. For example: ALT+0252 will insert a checkmark symbol.
Important: Don't skip step #1 otherwise you probably won't get the right character when you enter the code.

Make sure you change the font back to your previous font after inserting the symbol.

Here is a novel that could so easily have been loud. It is set among large events: the fight for Indian independence and the second world war. It features characters from history who enter the lives of the novel’s fictional characters, often to dramatic effect – the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the singer Begum Akhtar, the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete and the German painter and curator Walter Spies. It has at its heart a young boy whose mother leaves him to live in another country, and whose father responds to this crisis by also leaving the child for an extended period of time, and who is later imprisoned for his anti-British activism. There are many reasons to turn up the volume dial.
But readers of Anuradha Roy, whose previous novel Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize, know that shoutiness or showiness is never her style. She is a writer of great subtlety and intelligence, who understands that emotional power comes from the steady accretion of detail. Amid all the great events and characters of history, she chooses as her narrator a horticulturalist known throughout by his nickname, Myshkin – “a man who chose neither pen nor sword but a trowel”.
Myshkin is nine years old when his mother leaves him and his father in the fictitious Indian town of Muntazir, and embarks on a new life with Spies. Muntazir is 20 or so miles from the Himalayan foothills, and its name means, in Urdu, “one who waits impatiently”. After his mother’s departure, Myshkin’s life is spent anxiously waiting – for her letters to arrive, for her to return. In later years, he compares that waiting to “blood being drained away from our bodies until one day there was no more left”.
Myshkin is a man seeking to understand why his mother, Gayatri, made the choice she did
The older Myshkin, a man in his 60s, narrates the story. He is the adult version of the child whose blood drained away, now living quietly, more at home among trees than people. In the course of this deliberately self-contained life, a bulky envelope arrives one day. It has something to do with his mother, he knows, and he cannot bring himself either to open it or to throw it away. Instead, his narration takes us back to his mother’s childhood, and then to his own childhood. He is a man seeking to understand why his mother, Gayatri, made the choice she did – and to this end he delves into the unusual freedom of her adolescence, compared with the rigidity and constraint of her married existence in 1930s India.
She was an artist and dancer married to a man who saw dance as scandalous and art as irrelevant, particularly when set against the great matters of history in which he chose to be involved as a member of an anticolonial organisation, the Society for Indian Patriots. Into her world steps Spies, bringing with him new possibilities. (It would be best for the unknowing reader not to search out biographical details on Spies – knowing them might detract from some of the surprises of the plot.)
But Gayatri’s own life and art and Myskhin’s memories of his parents’ marriage are not sufficient to explain to him why his mother did what she did. He looks for answers elsewhere, searching in literature for insight into the tensions between women’s desires and the world’s expectations of them. To this end, the novel gives some space to discussing the Indian poet Maitreyi Devi, who wrote about her early romance with the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. It’s perhaps the only point in the book that doesn’t feel entirely well judged – Devi’s story could have done with occupying either far more, or less, space in the story, but even so it adds to our understanding of Myshkin’s quality of searching, the wound inside him that won’t ever heal.
Part of Roy’s skill as a writer is shown in her ability to reveal the awful consequences of Gayatri’s choices while retaining great compassion for those choices. This novel is not interested in condemning absent mothers. By contrast, Roy is refreshingly unimpressed by the anti-imperial activities of Myshkin’s father – who seeks freedom from being ruled while behaving like a tyrant in his own home. The world that rewards men for their public actions and forgives them their private cruelties, placing national politics above gender politics, is one that Roy slices through in her prose, though always obliquely.

Anuradha Roy wins 2016 DSC prize for south Asian literature

Read more
All the Lives We Never Lived is set largely in the early part of the 20th century, with some sections in the 1990s. It does not directly refer to #MeToo or the macho hyper-nationalism of today’s India. But in its portrayal of power structures, it is part of those very contemporary political conversations. It is also a beautifully written and compelling story of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath.
•Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury) is the winner of this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. All the Lives We Never Lived is published by MacLehose. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.