Don’t look now, but some units of the Macbook Air being sold on the gray market come with non-American keyboards, specifically Western Spanish ones which confound users because of its strange and unfamiliar physical layout and even more confusing keyboard assignments—pressing a key is always an adventure. I know this first hand because I procured one such Macbook Air for one of my bosses.

The sealed box looked typical for all intents and purposes, until we opened it up. The sparse documentation was all in Spanish, and the keyboard looked very odd and things quickly went downhill when we started typing on it. To our consternation a lot of the non-alphabetical characters that came out on the bright screen were totally different from the ones we pressed, going by what was printed on the keytop. Us Filipinos used to a US layout were in immediate trouble. Talk about lost in translation.

Strangely, info on alternative keyboard layouts were sparse. It took a while but we eventually found a solution for the key mismatching. From the outset it was obviously a matter of changing keyboard profiles—but which one?

For Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Airs with a Western Spanish keyboard, just go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu and select Spanish - ISO. If you don’t have it in your list of choices, you’ll have to dig out your install discs and load up the Spanish language choices so Spanish - ISO pops up as an option. After this, your keys won’t lie to you anymore; what you press is what you’ll get.

Now you’ll just have to live with the odd placement of keys, but that’s a whole lot better than the guessing game you had before. If you find other odd keyboard layouts, not just on Macs but on external keyboards from Apple, you can just use this method to pin down the right input menu profile.