Using special characters

On the Mac you can get the curled quotes via Alt and one or two other keys, depending on your language.

You can access a preview of the keyboard via system preferences >  keyboard, input sources, activate to show in the menu,

It is faster to get used to write with alt and shift for extended characters on the mac than using the glyph panel.

Here is the German (Germany and Austria) keyboard on the Mac:

With other languages you have a different layout, even with German (Swiss) it would be different, EN-US is different than EN-UK.

Perhaps you can tell us what application you are using?

In Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, you can use the Glyphs palette to access characters not accessible via keyboard.

In Microsoft Office applications, use the INSERT=>Symbol option from the ribbon to access any character available within a font.

For other applications that do not have such symbol or glyph palette capabilities, use Windows' Character Map utility (under Accessories=>System Tools from the Start Menu) to copy and paste special characters into other applications' text fields.

        - Dov