Type Special Characters with the Keyboard Viewer

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can use the keyboard viewer to type in special characters on the Mac, such as the trademark symbol or the copyright symbol, or even the Apple logo. Let’s see how we use the Keyboard Viewer on the Mac to type in special characters. Let’s go into my Mac.

So I’m in my Notes app here, and what I would like to do is I would I like to type in a trademark symbol here, or maybe the copyright symbol, or maybe even the Apple logo. So how do we do that? Well, there are certain key combinations that we can type with our Mac keyboard that will give us those symbols as well as others. So how do we know what those key commands are? Well, we’ll use the Keyboard Viewer to see this.

How do we get to our Keyboard Viewer? All we have to do is just go down to our System Preferences and then we go over to Keyboard, and under Keyboard we go to Input Sources. When I select this, you’re going to see the keyboard here. If I hold down the option key, you’re going to see that the keys will change. And now I can see all the special characters. What about the option and shift key? We have different characters. If I just hold down the shift key, it’s going to turn them into capital letters. So now with this Keyboard Viewer, I can easily see what I need to type to get the trademark symbol.

To get the trademark symbol, I hold down the option key. You’re going to see we have the trademark symbol under two. So now I know I just need to type in option two, and it’ll type the trademark symbol. What about that elusive Apple logo? If I use option and the shift key, you’re going to see we have the Apple logo. This is under the k key. So now I just type an option shift k. And it’ll give me the Apple logo. Now we have easy access to this Keyboard Viewer.

We can add this to our menu bar to make it easily accessible. To do that. We go down to the bottom here and you’re going to see Show Input Menu in Menu Bar. I select this and now in my menu bar, I have my Keyboard Viewer.

So now let’s close my System Preferences. I have my document here. I want to type in the trademark symbol. I’m not sure how to do that. All I do now is just go up to my menu bar and you’re going to see Show Keyboard Viewer. This is going to give us an overlay of our keyboard. Now I want to find that trademark symbol. How do I do that? Well, my just hold down my modifier keys. Let’s hold down the option key again. You’re going to see I have all my different special characters, including the trademark symbol. So now all I need to do is just click on this and you can see we have our trademark symbol. What about that elusive Apple logo? I use my modifier keys. I’m going to hold down the option and the shift key at the same time, and we have our Apple logo. So now I can click on this and there’s my Apple logo.

I can also find out how to use keyboard shortcuts with this. So now I know let’s go back over to my trademark symbol. We know that this is option two. I hold down the option key. We can see it’s the trademark symbol. It’s under the two key. So now I go back over to my document. I type in option two. There’s my trademark symbol. Again, what about the copyright symbol? Hold down the option key. I can see that the copyright symbol is right here. If I need to use this quite a bit, what I might want to do is learn the keyboard shortcut. So what key is this? This is the G key. So now I can go back over to my document. I go option G. And we have my copyright symbol. When you are finished with the keyboard, you just look on the X here and it closes the keyboard.

So that’s how we can use a Keyboard Viewer on the Mac to type in special characters, as well as learn what the keyboard shortcuts are to typing in those special characters. To show the Keyboard Viewer, we go to our System Preferences, keyboard input sources, and then we can add it to our menu bar. From there. We just go into our menu bar. We show the Keyboard Viewer. We start holding down some of the modifier keys to find out what our different special characters are. Just click on the special character and it’ll add it to your document.

So that’s how we use the keyboard viewer to type in special characters on the Mac.