Recently, subscriber Sandra Day wrote to ask me about a problem she was having. She knew one way to solve it — Word’s Insert Symbol dialog box, but that’s a pretty clumsy way. Here’s what she wanted to do:

Hi Terry! I have tried repeatedly to learn how to use a shortcut to insert a tilde over an “n” (as in jalapeño) in a Word document, but the keystrokes I find listed on the internet never seem to work. One shortcut suggests the control key + the tilde key above the tab key + n, but that doesn’t work. Another suggests Alt + 0241, but that doesn’t work either. I can use the symbol chart to insert it, but would prefer a shortcut method. Do you have any ideas? Is there a way to add that symbol every time I type the word “jalapeno”? Thanks for your help.

Sandra Day

If your problem is always jalapeno, you could use Word’s auto-correct function — put the misspelling as jalapeno and then the correct version with the tilde over the “n” — that should create an automatic correction for you.

You can set up the auto-correct function in Word 2003 as follows:…

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