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<ALT> 0151 will give an em dash (â) in ANY windoze program, just like <AL>
xxx will give any of the other "extended ASCII" characters (e.g. ÅâËâÅâÅ).
Why is this worse in word than anywhere else?
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It has to do with design approach. When I access an application's HELP application and type something like "EM dash", I don't want the ONLY topic to be "Automatically format hyphens as en dashes and em dashes", then go through a whole page explaining how to set up AutoCorrect, AutoFormat, formatting dashes, converting two hyphens into an EM dash, everything BUT how to make an EM dash.
It's so busy telling me how to customize a whole application to do something automatically that it forgot to just tell you me to do something.
That's the Word approach. Don't tell me how to do something, instead, tell me how to make the software do it for you.
Besides...maybe I haven't memorized the whole extended ASCII character set. I tried going into the Symbol table...for what looks like an EM dash, the value shown is 190.