How to type umlauts without going bonkers

Here is a rare beast, a geeky post from me.

Since I started to learn German, I have been frustrated by the fact that the standard US region installation of Windows doesn’t do umlauts very well. I knew of 3 options, all equally infuriating:

• Learn the Windows Alt codes for ö, ä and ü (Alt+0228, Alt+0246, Alt+0252). Would take me months to do without a cheat sheet, there has to be a better way.
• Use the MS Word-specific shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+: then the character). This means you have to open Word or Outlook whenever you want to type an umlauted character. Urgh.
• Switch to European keyboard layout (where many of the letters are in different places to optimise for Euro languages, eg. Z and Y are switched). The loss of efficiency is just not worth it for the number of German words that I actually need to type.

Courtesy of Ravi, here is a better way.

1. Go to Control Panel > Regional Settings > Keyboard Language (UI labels will vary based on your version of Windows)
2. Change your Keyboard Language to US-International
3. You now have easy (if not super-intuitive) keyboard shortcuts to add umlauts:
• For ä: Right-Alt + q
• For ü: Right-Alt + t
• For ö: Right-Alt + p
4. All your other keys still work exactly the same way.

Huzzah! Insanity averted!

Edit: Some more handy hints - For the Esszett character (ß) the shortcut is Right-Alt + s. For the Euro currency symbol (€) the shortcut is Right-Alt + 5.