Often in legal documents, you need to insert special characters not found on the keyboard, like paragraph symbols (¶) or section symbols (§). Here’s how to do that:
- Go to Insert, Symbol.
- Find the symbol you need to insert, and click Insert.
And there’s your symbol.
But, hey, if you’ve got to do this repeatedly, it gets old, right? Here’s another trick.
Look at the screen shot above. See that button on the bottom left-hand side that says “Shortcut Key …”? Click that:
Pick a key combination (say, ALT-P) and press it. If Word already has it assigned to another function, it will tell you. If that prior function isn’t something you want to use a hot-key for, you can override that and re-assign this symbol to that key. Or, you can pick another key combination (CNTL-SHIFT-P, for example).
Once you have the right hot-key assigned, click Assign, then Close, then Close again when you reach the Symbol dialog box. From now on, you can use your hot-key to insert the symbol in your documents without going through the menu system to do it!
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This is very well done. The instructions are easy to read and follow; use of space, design and color of the webpage are pleasing. -Thanks
my 3rd choice with your 5th place hit in Google search: “word 2007 special characters legal”, beating out “lib.law.washington.edu” and “office.microsoft.com” for best answer and bookmark status.
Wow — thanks! I really appreciate the compliment, and I especially appreciate your letting me know how you got here! I’m glad I could be of some help. If there are specific topics you’d like to see covered, by all means, drop me a line via the “Ask the Guru” page (http://legalofficeguru.com/suggest-an-article/)
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