Bill D -

An interesting program. I have bookmarked it for later, but can't promise when I'll get back to it.

Unfortunately, my application - the reason for my "research," has to be limited to what works "officially" within the Windows/Office family. It's a business support thing.

The thing that looked interesting, for those who might need it, is that Win95 and later do provide the capability for using a different keyboard - even it's only by simulation - and that many characters not otherwise readily available may be accessible this way. For someone corresponding in another language, it would seem the thing to do, as opposed to "picking" characters one at a time from one of the "translator" programs.

The problem with loading a different keyboard is that, unless you actually have a "physical" sample, with key markings, in your possession, or you learned to type on that kind of keyboard, it's really tough to figure out which key is what.

It also seemed that it might be helpful to point out that it's not really enough to say WinXX and OfficeYY in some cases. What Micro$oft calls "localization" can result in discussions in which both sides are "right" within their own context, but they don't realize that they're talking about different situations - especially if they're not aware of the existence of, in this case, the "localized" softare (and hardware) tools.

I had been aware that there were some differences between the keyboards typically sold in Europe and those in the US, but was not fully aware of the rather large number of variations and the extent of the differences until I started "poking around."

Micro$oft often doesn't make it easy to use the features present. Help file instructions tell you how to turn on another language, but they don't tell you that you have to turn on a keyboard appropriate to that language before you can easily use the characters the language contains. It has also been impossible, so far, to find anything resembling a keyboard "picture" showing how characters on anything but a standard US QWERTY keyboard is mapped. Two flavors of Dvorak keyboards are available, and I've known people interested in a tryout on one. While I can find a generic layout elsewhere, you would apparently have to go by the "brand markings" to know which of the Windows options to use.

I don't use Word2000, although my S.O. does, and I haven't investigated whether the Visual Keyboard is useable on anything else. It wasn't immediately apparent in the article I found.

Other bits and pieces I posted are not necessarily related to my own needs - they're just things that popped up while I was searching for something else, and looked like they might be helpful to a few 'catters. It seems you usually find more interesting things about stuff you didn't need to know than you find simple answers to what you went looking for when searching the KB; but I guess "that's the research business."

John