Beamed ♬ Musical Notes ♫ in Word, PowerPoint and More
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).
- Beamed musical notes different in each font
- Musical note symbol codes
- Quick access for commonly used symbols.
- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
- Windows Emoji Panel
- Windows Character Map
- MacOS and Office for Mac inserting characters
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.
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