Google Docs – Adding special characters

Apart from the usual fonts and letters we sometimes want to add very specific characters, e.g. arrows, Greek letters, emoji, etc. Docs provides a wide range of these and they are simple to insert into your document. In addition to this, Docs also provides a way to simply add mathematical equations.

Inserting special characters

Go to the “Insert” menu and select “Special characters”.

The Insert special characters dialogue box will open. On the left, you have the possible characters. At the top, you have menus to access more characters. On the right, you can either search for a character by name or even roughly draw it!

Let’s start by adding an arrow from the initial list of characters on the left. To do this all you need to do is, click on the character. It will automatically add the character to your document. Click twice, and it’ll add the character twice.

Once you’ve added one character, the top menu changes, and the “Categories” menu appears on the left.

Adding recently used characters

Click on the “Categories” menu and you’ll see that you have the option of filtering by the characters you’ve recently used. Click on “Recent characters”.

And here’s the arrow we inserted earlier. It’s a great way to insert characters if you’re adding the same ones again.

Choosing different characters

There are hundreds of characters to choose from. Click on the “Arrows” menu and you will see that Arrows is just one option in the “Symbol” menu. We can add Braille, game pieces, emoji, etc. Just click on a category and the possible characters will change.

We can also change the main menu and not just look for symbols, but other characters such as, emoji, and other scripts. For example, let’s choose the Latin script.

Here we can see the Latin alphabet, but not just the English one, but it includes the letters in other languages too. This is useful, for adding letters with accents if your keyboard doesn’t have a shortcut on it.

Plus, this includes further options, such as, the phonetic symbols (letters that represent sounds in a language), which as I work in teaching English as a Foreign Language, is very useful as it allows me to write out the phonetics of the words to help my students understand the pronunciation of a word. Clicking on Phonetics (IPA) brings up the phonetics, plus other symbols related to this field.

Finding special characters

As you can see, there are a lot of options here, and sometimes it can be hard to look through the various menus and pages of characters, and find what you’re looking for. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to do this.

First, we can draw the character we want. In the box on the right, draw with your mouse, roughly the symbol you’re looking for. Here I was looking for the Greek letter Theta. In the search results on the left, I can see that it found it, plus it found other possibilities that look similar to what I drew.