How to type a backlash on Mac

On a Japanese keyboard type: Option + ¥ (the symbol to the left of the delete key).

The location depends on the keylayout you use, on U.S. keyboards they are on the right side at level zero. On other keyboards, you may have them at option / alt level, have a look at the Keyboard Viewer.

Or try alt-shift-7

or alt-shift-/

Which Country Keyboard?

Turn on ->System Preferences->Keyboard->Show Keyboard in Menu, then with the Virtual Keyboard, try various combinations (i.e. shift + alt keys)

Try: alt-7

May be a lot of variants, e.g. Romanian Standard keylayout also pushed one of these slashes at the next, option level, which is entirely logical as long as the zero and one level are occupied by other chars. I also think he uses a keylayout, which obturates those slashes and zero level, and pushes them upwards.

Well, well, on this occasion I found that Danish keylayout requires shift-alt-7 for backslash. I activated Danish and found that, as always, specific chars are on the right side of the keylayout, this is valid for many European languages, if not all. As that part of the keylayout is occupied by specific chars, backslash must be moved to a higher level.

The location of backslash (and any letter, symbol etc.) depends on the active keyboard layout. In order to find where is located a desired char, activate the keyboard viewer (in sys prefs/keyboard), open it (it is where the keyboard layouts are), and beging to press keys, including option and shift, in order to find its location. This is also influenced by the physical keyboard, i.e. where ISO (with the extra right to the left shift key) or US (without that key), because backslash is exactly there on some keylayouts planned to work with an ISO physical keyboard.

I was having this problem this morning. What I found was that the backslash character (\) on my keyboard did not produce a backslash in Microsoft Word— it produces a strange character, like a Y with crossbars. However, the same key DOES produce a genuine backslash in Microsoft Excel (and in this window -- see above!). So I conclude that this problem is application-specific.

TomD67 wrote:

I was having this problem this morning. What I found was that the backslash character (\) on my keyboard did not produce a backslash in Microsoft Word— it produces a strange character, like a Y with crossbars.

That is the symbol for Yen, ¥. Change the font you are using and see if that fixes it. Some Japanese fonts switch those two characters. You should avoid using Asian fonts for English no matter how nice they might look.

Thanks, but I am not using any Asian fonts. The Yen symbol (thanks for that information!) was produced consistently in MS Word, no matter which font I chose -- including Cambria, Calibri, and Courier New!

TomD67 wrote:

Thanks, but I am not using any Asian fonts. The Yen symbol (thanks for that information!) was produced consistently in MS Word, no matter which font I chose -- including Cambria, Calibri, and Courier New!

When you select just the Yen symbol, does it still say Cambia in the font window?

Are there any settings in your Word program or your OS or the .doc that are on Japanese?

You should probably ask as well in the forums run by MS for problem with its stuff:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_mac

Yes, the font name is still Cambria, or Calibri, or Courier New. If there are any Japanese settings in my MS Word, I didn't put them there myself. Thanks for the suggestion about contacting Microsoft.

I suspect that the backslash character is used internally in Word as a control character. I tried to add it to a list of "Do not correct" items in AutoCorrect Preferences, but that had no effect.

Vivimagic wrote:

I found that on the British Mac Keyboard it is the key onto the left of the key marked z, which is located here:

Your posting is confusing, because

+The picture you posted in not a British Mac Keyboard (that kind of keyboard has the £ sign on 3 key).

+The key you circled does not have a backslash ( \ ) on it, but instead the backtick/grave and the tilde.

Is that what you really intended?

The image was more to show where the key was more than actually being an British keyboard but I do see your point though.
I am just sharing what worked for me on a VM machine. I have however noticed that this an post for Mac OS Lion, and my method worked on Mac OS El Capitan, so my comment might be in the wrong section.

Vivimagic wrote:

I am just sharing what worked for me on a VM machine. I have however noticed that this an post for Mac OS Lion, and my method worked on Mac OS El Capitan, so my comment might be in the wrong section.

Thanks for the clarification, I understand now, that is where you would likely find backslash on British Windows.

I don't think the OS version would matter, keyboard layouts almost never change. But the question actually related to using a Danish keyboard to log into a Windows server, and was answered (shift-alt-7) 5 years ago. The forum software sometimes makes it hard to see the entire discussion.