Macs Better Than PCs For Accents, Spanish

I took the plunge into Macs earlier this year and have to say I’m not disappointed. Although purchasing a MacBook Pro this year was a huge adjustment from the Dell laptop I’d been using for three years, but one of the best features of my new computer is that it’s much easier to insert accent marks.

As someone who has two accents in her name, believe me, this makes a huge difference to me. And while I do not write in Spanish as often as I could — or should — when I do, the Mac accent integration is so much easier than it was when I was using my Dell laptop.

When I began to place the accent mark on the actual computer instead of writing it in on the printed page manually, it could become quite cumbersome on the PCs I used for decades. For those not in the know, you have to either select from the Symbols menu every time or press Control, apostrophe (‘) and the letter you want accented all at the same time.

Of course if you have a Spanish keyboard the whole process is much easier. Macs have managed to imitate this Spanish functionality without changing up the entire keyboard. You don’t have to press all types of keys at once, but rather, just press Option, E and then whatever letter you want accented — including the ñ (but in this case you do Option, N and then N again)!

There’s a similarly easy process for upside-down exclamation and question marks: Option and 1 for the ¡ and Option, Shift, ? for the ¿. Now this doesn’t work, as far as I know, for the accents that tilt to the left (French accents?) but for a pocha who tends to write in Spanish and absolutely must accent at least twice every time I spell my name, it makes a huge difference.