Quotation Marks do not appear correctly when typed in front of a word beginning with a vowel.

Question

My father-in-law has a new computer with the Microsoft Home Office version (a.k.a. Student version); he has problems with quotations in Word:  when he tries to type a vowel or a word beginning with a vowel in quotes, ie "a", he gets a with two dots above it.  This only happens on words which begin with a vowel.  His language is set as English and all other keys/letters and symbols work fine.  Also, when he hits the quotation key, the quote marks to not appear until he types a word or hits the space bar.  How can he fix his quotation marks so they type correctly for words begining with a vowel?

Answer 1

Your father-in-law has an international keyboard layout enabled. With this layout, the " key becomes a "setup key" or "dead key" for typing vowels with an umlaut or diaeresis. As you have noted, in order to type quotes, it is necessary to press the quote key twice. Here's how to fix the problem:

1. Click the Start button and choose Control Panel.
2. In the Control Panel, select Region and Language.
3. Select the Keyboards and Languages tab.
4. Click Change Keyboards...
5. Ordinarily the language selected (since it is the default) would be "English (United States) - US," but you will probably see "English (United States) - United States-International."
6. Click the arrow beside the selection to see whether the default US is available. If so, select it and OK out of all the dialogs.
7. If not, click Add, scroll down to English (United States), check the appropriate box, and click OK.
8. If you're using "English (United Kingdom)" and click "Show More...," you'll find a plethora of different keyboards, but the only international one appears to be the "United States-International" one. In any case, you would want to instead select the box for "United Kingdom."
9. When you've got the keyboard set to the appropriate US or UK one, OK twice to exit the dialog.

Answer 2

I found this very helpful