Do you need ticks, crosses, check marks, or tickboxes for your document?

Ignore any guide that tells you to use the Wingdings font!

Instead, copy the symbol you want from here:

☐ ☑ ☒ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘ ⮽ 🗵 🗷 🗹

… then paste into your document.

Easy!

Why is Wingdings bad?

If you ask Google how to insert a check mark into Microsoft Word (or Office, or Excel, or Outlook…) all of the answers will suggest using the Wingdings font.

That’s a terrible idea! If someone changes the font, your ✔ symbol will turn into a ü.

This is why emails sent from Outlook and Hotmail used to come through with mysterious J characters in them:

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Hi Brittany;

Hope you enjoyed the chocolate!

JJJ Lewis

The J’s used to be Wingdings smiley faces ☺☺☺, but a font change turned it into JJJ.

Unicode: The right way to do it

Unicode has made Wingdings obsolete.

You can look up and insert Unicode symbols using a website like unicode-table.com.

Alternatively, you can use Windows’ built in Character Map utility, shown below. (Character Map is installed on all Windows computers.)

More MS Office tips

• MS Word Tricks: Typing Math Symbols

Addendum

The check mark symbols above have Unicode code points as follows:

• ☐ U+2610 Ballot box
• ☑ U+2611 Ballot box with check
• ☒ U+2612 Ballot box with X
• ✓ U+2713 Check Mark
• ✔ U+2714 Heavy Check Mark
• ✗ U+2717 Ballot X
• ✘ U+2718 Heavy ballot X
• ⮽ U+2BBD Ballot box with light X
• 🗵 U+1F5F5 Ballot box with script X
• 🗷 U+1F5F7 Ballot box with bold script X
• 🗹 U+1F5F9 Ballot box with bold check