Hi Lisa,
the reason why that small empty box appears instead of the desired symbol is
because the font you are currently using does not contain that symbol. Try
switching to Times New Roman, as this font (the one that comes with
Microsoft Office 2004) is very complete. Lucida Grande might also be an
option, or Arial.
Generally speaking, though, in times of Unicode, the method of inserting
symbols through the Insert>Symbol option in Word has become kind of
obsolete, but if it works for you, just keep using it. An alternative would
be to use the character palette, which you can activate by opening System
Preferences and clicking on International. Switch to the third tab, and make
sure the box next to Character Palette is checked. You should now see the
language flag show up in the menu bar (in case it hasn't been there
already), and if you click on it, you'll be able to select Show Character
Palette, and the Palette will then open. Now, you do not specify which
symbol you want to use, so you will have to browse through the character
palette's collections to find the one you're looking for, but as soon as
you've done that, select it, then click on Insert in the lower right corner.
The symbol should then appear in your Word document, at the same spot where
your text cursor is.
By the way, you will only need to activate the palette once; as soon as it's
been enabled in the System Preferences, you can access it anytime from the
language menu, in any application.
Can anyone help me....when I insert a symbol in Microsoft Word 2004 for
Mac, a small empty box appears instead of the letter/symbol that I
want. I saw something about character pallete and imput menus, but I
have no idea what all of this means. I don't know what to do, and the
Microsoft website offers no help to this problem. any help you can
offer me would be excellent....please remember i am NOT a computer
person, so if you could explain the problem in simple terms it would be
great. thanks.
--
Michel Bintener
Microsoft MVP
Office:Mac (Entourage & Word)
***Always reply to the newsgroup.***
