My daughter has started her second year of Spanish. I am a Japanophile and told her that I had recently purchased a Japanese word processor. She asked if there was such a thing as a Spanish word processor to save her from having to continually do the Alt+number to produce the required accented letter.

I searched on the internet and couldn't find a word processor per se, is there any method to make it easier to type all these letters in?

Easy Earline,
if you go to Control Panel, you'll find an icon saying "international options and languages" or something similar (I'm translating from my italian system). If you go there, under "Languages" you should find a way to change the "way you can introduce text" or something like that... it doesn't sound exactly clear (at least in Italian) but I'm pretty confident you'll find it!
There you can set which kind of "keyboard" you're using when writing, chose Spanish traditional and you're done!
You can then add an icon on your bottom bar to skip from one "keyboard" to the other...

I don't know of a specific wordprocessor for Spanish. Most people use Word. The issue is Word and other word processors look to see what country the operating system or keyboard is set to.

I suspect Earline's daughter has an English keyboard so changing the keyboard setting in XP to Spanish wouldn't help her unless she was familiar with the layout of a Spanish keyboard. There is also the accessory Character Layout where you can copy and paste the accented characters but I find the keypad is faster.

One other option that might work is to use the International US keyboard layout. This does require that you make changes to XP and I don't know if it will affect the Japanese wordprocessor setup. If you are interested in switching to the International US keyboard layout, this page will be helpful. It tells you how to configure XP and how to type the combinations to create accents.

Thanks, Marta.

I understand your point of view but personally I have an Italian keyboard and I always use the Spanish settings since I can write in any European language with it. The differences with the Italian keyboard are minimal and they're very easy to learn...I chat in Spanish and sometimes with two different people in Spanish and English at the same time... should I type combinations to create accents I'd die... I suppose that it all depends on how often she writes in Spanish...