Maybe you're not the world's fastest typist, or maybe you make so many typing errors that your spelling checker has resigned. Or maybe you're just plain tired of typing. Here's good news: Word 97 and 2000 offer you an easy way to enter text in a document with just your mouse.

Start by selecting InsertÑSymbol to display the Symbol dialog box illustrated in FIGURE 2. Then drag the box out of the way of your typing position in the document. To work with text in your document's normal font, select the (normal text) option from the Font list. If you need a special-character or symbol font, you may select it from the drop-down list.

Click on the location in the document where you want the text to go, then insert a character by double-clicking it in the dialog box. You'll find all of the standard English text characters near the top of the Symbol dialog box's characters window; foreign-language characters and other symbols are near the bottom. You can see an enlarged version of any character by clicking it once.

Word 2000 supports even more foreign-language characters and additional symbols, which are visible when you scroll down the character display. All the characters will appear on the monitor, but not all of them will print out, so be sure to do a test printing.

And don't forget the Special Characters tab. There you'll find em and en dashes and spaces, breaking and nonbreaking hyphens, ellipsis marks, various types of quotation marks, and other useful symbols of all types and descriptions.

By GEORGE CAMPBELL