Using the US-International Keyboard

To type in Spanish, it is better to install a keyboard layout that allows you to enter accented and other characters used by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian such as á, ì, ö, ç, and ¿. Here are the instructions for installing the figuration as your default keyboard:

For computers using Windows Vista:
  1. Click on Start, then Control Panel.
  2. Open “Regional and Language Options,” then select the "Keyboards and Languages" tab.
  3. Click on “”Change Keyboards.
  4. If US-International does not appear among the keyboard options, click on Add.
  5. Scroll down to English (US). Under Keyboard place a check in the box next to US International. Click OK.
  6. Check to make sure US International displays as the Default Input Language.
  7. Then click OK to close all the option windows.
  8. Close the Control Panel window.

For computers using Windows XP:
  9. Click on Start, then Control Panel.
  10. Open “Regional and Language Options,” then single click on the "Languages" tab (the second tab).
  11. Under “Text Services and Input Languages,” click on “Details” button.
  12. Under “Installed Services,” scroll down to English (US)-Keyboard. If US-International does not appear as an option, install it by clicking on Add.
  13. In the upper window, “Default Input Language,” select “United States-International” from the drop-down menu. Click “OK.”
  14. Then click OK to close “Regional and Language Options” and return to the Control Panel window.
  15. Close the Control Panel window.

Once the US-International has been selected, accessing the accented characters is quite easy because the characters for acute, grave, and circumflex accents and tildes have now been made into "dead" keys, which means that nothing happens immediately upon pressing the apostrophe key or another accent key. If the next key pressed is a vowel, an accented vowel will appear. For an accented a (á), for example, just type the apostrophe, then the a. For an è, type the backward apostrophe ` then the e: è. An i with a circumflex is created by typing the circumflex (shift 6: ^) then the i: î. This also works with the double quote (") for the (diéresis) and the tilde (ñ, ã). Not all combinations are so intuitive:
To get:    Type:
ç          apostrophe then c
¡          Shft+Alt+Ctrl+1
¿          Alt+Ctrl+/
Note that if the next key entered after the accent is not a vowel or other letter, then you will get the apostrophe or other mark followed by the letter: 'n, ^p, ~d. If you want to enter just an apostrophe or other mark, enter the mark followed by the space key to get ' " ^ ~, etc.