Putting accents on capital letters in our texts has always been a bit complicated. In reality, the keys to write them are not directly on the keyboard. When the time comes to write an accented letter at the beginning of a sentence, we don’t know how to go about it. Find out in this content how to put an accent on a capital letter.
By using very simple key combinations
Using key combinations can help you place accents on uppercase vowels. To put an acute accent on a capital letter, you must hold down the Ctrl key and click at the same time on the apostrophe key (key 4 on the top line of the keyboard). Then release and grab the vowel you want to emphasize.
To put a grave accent on a capitalized vowel, you must press and hold the Ctrl and Alt keys simultaneously. Then, you must click on the grave accent key (key 7 on the top row of the keyboard) before releasing and entering the desired vowel. So for À (uppercase), you must use the following combination: Ctrl+ Alt+ 7 then Shift +A.
Using keyboard shortcuts
Another way to place accents on capital letters is to use keyboard shortcuts. It is a very simple method which consists in using the Unicode of the character concerned. It is also called the ASCII encoding standard. In reality, each character has its own code. To place the accent on a capital vowel, you must hold the Alt key and then enter the desired Unicode from the numeric keypad to display the character. The use of numeric keypad is, in fact, essential for this method. To write À (in capitals), you must use one or the other of the following two combinations: Alt +183 or Alt +0192.
Using the Special Character Map in Windows
If the previous methods do not work for you, there is yet another possibility. It consists in displaying the table of characters and integrating the character you have chosen in your document. This technique is very simple. To display this table, you only have to go to the “Insert” tab in your Microsoft Word.
Next, enter the “Symbol” option. From here you can select the accented capital letter you want. In this case, you will have to select To.
You can also directly press the “Start” menu on your computer and enter “charmap” or “character map” in the command prompt, then validate. Once the “Character Map” window is open, choose the character of your choice, then press copy to be able to insert it into your text.
Copy/paste to use accented uppercase letters
Here are some accented uppercase letters, including the uppercase, that you could use in French as in other languages. To use them, you just need to recover them by a simple copy-paste (Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste with Windows):
À Á Â Ä Å Ã Æ Ç É È Ê Ë Í Ì Î Ï Ñ Ó Ò Ô Ö Ø Õ Œ Ú Ù Û Ü Ý Ÿ Ŷ
To keep this sequence, you can for example keep it in a text document or in the Notepad application. To do this, go to your desktop and press the right button of your mouse. Select “New” then “Text document”.
Copy the entire sequence of accented capitals and paste it into this new file, which you will keep prominently on the Windows desktop. Just double-click on its icon, it will open in the Notepad app supplied with Windows.
It is also possible to take the icon of this text file and pin it to the taskbar. To write a word with the capital letter, you just have to copy it specifically and paste it into the text.
