Inserting check marks in MS Office ✔

Posted: , Updated: Category: Computers

Do you need ticks, crosses, check marks, or tickboxes for your document?

Ignore any guide that tells you to use the Wingdings font!

Instead, copy the symbol you want from here:

☐ ☑ ☒ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘ ⮽ 🗵 🗷 🗹

… then paste into your document.

Easy!


Why is Wingdings bad?

If you ask Google how to insert a check mark into Microsoft Word (or Office, or Excel, or Outlook…) all of the answers will suggest using the Wingdings font.

That’s a terrible idea! If someone changes the font, your symbol will turn into a ü.

This is why emails sent from Outlook and Hotmail used to come through with mysterious J characters in them:

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Hi Brittany;

Hope you enjoyed the chocolate!

JJJ Lewis

The J’s used to be Wingdings smiley faces ☺☺☺, but a font change turned it into JJJ.


Unicode: The right way to do it

Unicode has made Wingdings obsolete.

You can look up and insert Unicode symbols using a website like unicode-table.com.

Alternatively, you can use Windows’ built in Character Map utility, shown below. (Character Map is installed on all Windows computers.)


More MS Office tips


Addendum

The check mark symbols above have Unicode code points as follows:

  • ☐ U+2610 Ballot box
  • ☑ U+2611 Ballot box with check
  • ☒ U+2612 Ballot box with X
  • ✓ U+2713 Check Mark
  • ✔ U+2714 Heavy Check Mark
  • ✗ U+2717 Ballot X
  • ✘ U+2718 Heavy ballot X
  • ⮽ U+2BBD Ballot box with light X
  • 🗵 U+1F5F5 Ballot box with script X
  • 🗷 U+1F5F7 Ballot box with bold script X
  • 🗹 U+1F5F9 Ballot box with bold check