I started taking a French language course at a community college. I took 4 years of high school French more than 30 years ago, but the 2nd semester of college French is pretty difficult (I skipped the 1st semester). I have an assignment to write a composition in French. I heard that you can configure Word so that accents can be put in easily, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. I'm using Word 2007. If someone can give me pointers, I'd appreciate it. Merci beaucoup!

It is not really a function of Word but more a function of the operating system and the setting for the keyboard. Word will support Western European characters without any changes but you have to know how to generate the character using your keyboard.

Here is a page on Slow Travel France which provides some links which might help you.

Here's an overview of your options.

1) Change your windows keyboard settings to an International Keyboard setting. The first link "Typing French Accents" will take you to an About French page with instructions on how to change your operating system. It also has instructions how to use certain combination keys such as ' followed by a vowel.

2) If you don't want to change your system keyboard settings, then you can use the 10-key pad codes to generate specific accented characters. You can find the numbers on the Slow Travel page. Example: hold down Alt and while holding down press 133 on the 10-key pad to generate à.

3) Use the utility Character Set found under All Programs > Accessories > System Tools. This is useful if you don't have the list of accented character 10-key numbers and you only need to generate one or two characters. You can select the character and then copy and paste into Word.

Good luck,

I don't have Word 2007 (using Word 2003), but I do something different yet. I don't know if this applies to Word 2007, but maybe it will be useful to others who have an older version.

I use keyboard shortcuts to add an accent, circumflex etc. You can see info on Microsoft's website here. I've finally managed to memorize several of these, though I haven't figured out how to insert these when posting in Slow Travel!

An easy way to see the shortcuts while you're in Word is to type "foreign accents" into the Help box up at the top and the shortcuts will be one of your choices and you can open the small help screen from within Word.

Kathy

Nice tip Kathy. I didn't realize there was also a way within Word. We should add it to the Slow Travel on French Language Resources.

Thanks, Kathy and Marta, for your suggestions. I'll try the keyboard shortcuts as it seems easier. I've set the primary language on the operating system to French so Word detects when certain words should have accents. I still have to put accents manually on words that can pass as both past and present tense (I'll try Kathy's suggestion).

For writing French, the online French-English dictionaries have been real useful. However, I'm finding difficulty looking up phrases. For example, when I want to say "set up" (as in setting up equipment for a gymnastics competition), many possibilities come up. I pick one that sounds the most appropriate, but it's a guess work at best sometimes.

Anyway, thanks. My assignment should be completed a littler easier now!

Go in Windows Control Panel/Regional settings and add the French Canadian keyboard to your settings. You will then be able to click on your Menu bar to get to the French Canadian keyboard. Why not the French? Because we, French Canadians, work with a QWERTY keyboard (same as you guys in the States) but for instance the / key to the right of the "." key is "é". ****+"," will give you the apostrophe ("'") and so on. Lot more simple than using a French keyboard where the Q is on the A and vice-versa...
All you will have to learn is a few keys but almost all of your usual keys will work thye same.

Sorry the **** was SHIFT and the apostrophe is ' and not ("")

yymca6: I'll try the QWERTY keyboard suggestion also and see which way is easier for me. Thanks!

I use and really like the United States-International keyboard layout in MS Windows. It makes it easy to type accents for French. The only complication is that if you press " followed by a vowel, you get ä or ë etc. instead of quotations marks. You have to press " and then spacebar and then the vowel to see "a or "e etc. The same is true with the single quote ' but I don't use it much except when I want é or ç (press ' followed by e or c).

I used to use the numeric keypad and type, for example ALT + 0233 to get é, but that's hard to do on a laptop keyboard where there is no separate numberic keypad. The US-International keyboard makes more sense.

I don't speak French, but I have a similar problem in Italian. I eventually gave up trying to write using Word because a) I had problems getting a spell checker (I believe it is a pay for add on) and b) I did not want to constantly change settings from one language to another.

What I found helped was to download Open Office. It is a free office suite. I have set Open office to default to Italian spelling, and Use Word for all my work and English documents.

The advantage of this is that the spelling, complete with accents is corrected for me.

TimW

Spell checkers for lots lof language including French are part of Word, you only have to activate them (or install them if you did not install them to save room on your computer)

quote:

Originally posted by kaydee:
I use keyboard shortcuts to add an accent, circumflex etc. You can see info on Microsoft's website here.
Kathy

This worked really well in Word 2007 and it's very easy. Thanks for the tip! I also use the French spell checker in Word which is convenient, but it keeps me from memorizing French spelling. Too bad it doesn't check for sentence structure. I'll have to wait until my composition is corrected by the prof to know if I was grammatical.