Q: keyboard characters are  no displaying correctly

vdalbora wrote:

 

My keyboard is not displaying the correct characters. The letters and numbers are OK but characters such as the question mark, colon, the at sign, etc do not display correctly. I've tried a portable keyboard and the same thing happens.

The software is Microsoft Office 2011 for mac. Is this a software problem?

Is MS Office the only place where this happens?  Not in Mail or Safari or anything else?

What exactly displays when you hit Shift + 2?

Go to system preferences/language & text/input sources and uncheck all the boxes except for US.  If you are normally working in Spanish, uncheck all the boxes except for Spanish ISO.  In any case, do not leave Spanish checked.

If you are normally working in some language other than English or Spanish, let us know what it is.

vdalbora wrote:

 

I don't know how it got checked in the first place.

It's very common for Spanish speakers, when first setting up their Mac, to select Spanish as the default keyboard.  But they soon find out that Mac keyboards are printed for Spanish ISO instead, so they add that one.  If you have two keyboards checked, it is easy to mistakenly switch between them via the shortcut  Command plus space.