problems getting the quote symbols to appear

[Angelica]

I've recently updated to Office Ultimate and now have a problem every time I
want to put in quotation marks - I used to press shift+' in order to get the
double quote symbol to appear. Now, the quotation mark won't appear unless I
press some letter or spacebar. To make matters worse, if I use a letter,
it'll create a symbol of two dots above the letter. How do I get this to
stop?!

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Near the Windows Taskbar notification area, do you see letters like EN, ES,
or FR? My guess is that you've pressed one of the shortcut combinations that
turns on ES or FR (spanish or french). Either of these use the "dead keys"
approach to creating accented letters, which what you're seeing.

Click the ES (or whatever you see), and choose Enlish (United States), or
whatever your desired/default language is.

To prevent it from happening by accident again, right click the EN and
choose Settings. Click the Advanced Key Settings tab (at least, that's what
the tab is called in Vista), and set the Hot keys for input languages to
(None) for each of the languages shown. You can still change keyboard
languages by clicking the EN, but it won't happen unintentionally anymore.