Mac: Special characters - how to insert them

On the Mac, the well-known special characters such as percent or quotation marks are not printed on the keyboard. Nevertheless, there are several keyboard shortcuts you can use to quickly insert special characters into your documents or messages.

These special characters are available on the Mac

If you switch from a Windows PC to a Mac computer, the consequence is that you can no longer use the familiar shortcuts for inserting special characters. But even on the Mac, various special characters are available for you to use when composing text documents or messages. In addition to classic special characters, such as the "greater than or equal to" or the "average" symbol, you can also insert emojis, currency symbols, or accented letters using keyboard shortcuts.

How to insert the most important special characters

Since there are no special characters printed on the Mac keyboard, it is important to know the keyboard shortcuts for the most common special characters in order to insert them quickly into documents.

1. To insert currency signs, please press the key combination of "Alt" + "E" for the Euro sign and the keys "Shift" + "4" for the Dollar sign. The sign the British pound you get with "Alt" + "Shift" + "4".
2. The special character "@" in email addresses can again be inserted by pressing "cmd" + "L".
3. To add an emoji to your messages, please press the key combination of "Ctrl" + "cmd" + "Space" to open the character overview window and select the desired emoji.
4. Also the insertion of square brackets is possible with the help of the key combinations from "Alt" + "5" and "Alt" + "6" respectively.
5. Additionally insert the mathematical special characters for percent and pi with "Shift key" + "5" and "Alt" + "P" respectively.