Special Characters Menu is a tiny memory-resident program that can display a pop-up window of the most commonly used special characters for easy insertion into any document or text.
The free program can be kicked into action whenever needed by pressing a hotkey combination.
I don’t use special characters often, but for those times that I did need them lately it rather seemed that they were buried too far away for easy access: Start menu > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map.
I was recently reviewing a program and wanted to find the degree (°; as in 45°) character and was surprised when I finally got the character map open that it wasn’t a straightforward, easy task to identify the proper (°) symbol from all the various other round symbols that were there.
Another time I was looking for delta (?, as in the difference between two numbers) and also found it more difficult to find than it should have been. This is why this program it immediately got my attention when I found it.
If you use special characters a lot you will appreciate Special Characters Menu. By invoking its hotkey (Win+C) a window will pop up within any application that you are using that displays a good number of most frequently used special characters, including ±, ?, ?, ?, ?, ÷, ?, ?, ©, ®, ™, €, ¢, ¥, ½, ¼, ¾, ?, °, and many others (see screenshot for entire range of special characters). Here are more notes on this program:
- Does not require installation, simply unzip and run. You will need to create a shortcut for this one in the startup folder if you want it to start with Windows.
- Takes up around 6 megs in memory. Not a lot although it should have been less in my opinion.
- The source code for the program is including in the downloaded zipped archive.
The verdict: good innovative freeware that works as intended. There are some readers out there which sometimes use special characters or use them a lot that will be very happy to have found this program I’m sure.
Version Tested: 1.0
Compatibility: WinAll.
Use this direct link to download.
