French keyboards and how to type special characters like é ù ç è à  I was wondering if there was an easy way for people using English keyboards to create those characters.  I think in Microsoft Word you can type control-' (apostrophe) and then "e" or "a" to create different accents.  However, I was wondering if there is a standard to do that (if you are in a text editor for example).

For people who write both in English and French, I suppose do you just switch into a French keyboard then?  I'm just not used to it, and I have to hunt around for the letters...