How to get exotic symbols into your text

A Facebook friend posted about her dogs being happy to be outside in 13° weather, except she used an asterisk* instead of the degree symbol.

It occurred to me that a lot of folks don’t know how to get non-keyboard symbols into their text using the Character Map feature of Windows, so here’s how you do it:

Click on the Start Menu>Accessories>System Tools>Character Map. Then find the symbol you want and click on it. If there is a keystroke combination for it, you’ll see it in the bottom right corner of the frame. In this case, you make the ° symbol by holding down the Alt key and typing 0176 on the keypad.

But some symbols don’t work that way. If there is no Keystroke combination, click on the symbol, then click the Select button, then the Copy button. That saves it to the Notepad and you can paste it into your text using the Insert key.