23 February 2023

Beamed ♬ Musical Notes ♫ in Word, PowerPoint and More

Peter Deegan Fonts, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office for Mac, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, Office 2021 / Office LTSC, Office 365 Symbols & Emoji in Microsoft Office, Windows and Mac

Type beamed ♫ or joined ♬ musical notes into Word documents, Excel worksheets, PowerPoint slides or emails.

It’s possible to type musical notes and other notation in Word documents. Full musical scoring isn’t practical (there’s other software).

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Unicode only has two ‘beamed’ or joined musical notes, the Eighth or Quaver and the Sixteenth of Semi-quaver.

Beamed musical notes different in each font

Most fonts don’t include musical notes. The only common Office font that can help is Segoe UI Symbol.

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There are specialist musical notation fonts such as Bravura (OpenType download) which has sans-serif versions of the notes.

Musical note symbol codes

These are the important code numbers or values you’ll need to enter the three symbols. Use the Alt + X shortcut in Word for Windows, for example type 266b then Alt + X to type ♫

Beamed Eighth Note ♫

(Beamed Quaver) ♫ 266b

Beamed Sixteenth Note ♬

(Beamed Semi-quaver) ♬ 266C

Quick access for commonly used symbols.

If you use a symbol often, a fast way to enter it is AutoCorrect.

Once in a document you can copy it to AutoCorrect and make your own shortcut.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook

Insert | Symbols | Symbol should work but doesn’t because, at present, Office for Windows doesn’t support the high-numbered Unicode symbols. Word’s Find can’t find all Unicode symbols and emoji

Windows Emoji Panel

The current Windows Emoji Panel (Windows 10 and 11) doesn’t support musical note symbols – ridiculous but sadly true.

Windows Character Map

Like Office Insert Symbol the Windows Character Map accessory in all Windows releases does NOT support high-end Unicode characters like emoji.

MacOS and Office for Mac inserting characters

On a Mac, to enter the Male, Female or combo symbol:

Command + Control + Spacebar shortcut to open the Character Viewer.
Search for “beamed” and the Viewer should find the symbol you need.

Despite the name Character Viewer, the Apple system tool will also insert characters into any program, including Office for Mac.

Musical notes in Word, Excel and More

Typing Numero and other symbols in Office
Word’s symbol substitution, the good and the bad