Can I assign special characters to certain keys in the Dell XPS?

I think this is more of a software question, but I'll ask it here anyway just in case someone has tried it on their Dell XPS because I'm planning to buy an M1330 late this year.

You see, I'm going to order an M1330 with a QWERTY keyboard (meaning no accentuated letters). The problem is, I live in France and from time to time, I have to type documents that contain accentuated letters like é, è, à and ç. I don't want to buy one with an AZERTY keyboard because I'll be leaving France in a few years time.

My question is, would it be possible to assign those special characters to unused or rarely used function keys on the laptop's keyboard? For example, I'd assign é to F9, è to F10 à to F11 and ç to F12?

It would be nice if there's Dell software that could do the job, but a third party software suggestion that you've tried would be fine.

Thanks in advance!

 

you could always just go alt+### to get an accented letter... just print off a list how to do them.

 

i memorize the ASCII codes already. the problem is, they only work with the numbers on the number keypad (on a desktop pc keyboard) and not with the numbers found on top of the letter keypad. Also, if I were to do that each time on a laptop, I would have to hit the Numlock key just to activate the laptop's "number keypad" (replaced by the letters U I O J K L and M). It's absolutely not an option considering the volume of words in the French language that utilize accentuated letters.

 

Buy a separate keyboard

 

For accented characters, I use a cool trick that makes it really easy (only works on Microsoft Word, though). What you do is press Ctrl+the key that repesents the accent closest (ex. ' for é, ~ for ñ)+ the letter.

So if you wanted to create the character à, you would press Ctrl+`+a and the character comes up. Makes it really easy for typing accented characters.

 

maybe if i'm at home, a spare azerty keyboard would be a good idea, but that would look funny if i'm in school

thanks so much for the suggestion smoothtofu! i never knew you could do that!! i've been doing ALT+#### for a long long time and i'm tired of it.. finally, a shorter solution.. i should start getting used to that and fast!

i found this https://www.atlas.uiuc.edu/classrooms/PDF/UI_sheet_accents

thanks again for your replies guys!

 

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: Depending on the situation you may have to leave a break in between say Ctrl+~+n (ñ), since you need to use an uppercase accent (in this case, the tilde key). So you would go like Ctrl+Shift+` then n.