Working with my new Mac and new MS Word 2011.

I cannot find the old familiar character palette with accented Latin letters, foreign letters, fractions, symbols, etc., despite having searched the Word "Help" function and doing a search for "special characters" on this forum.

On my former Mac, it was contained in a drop-down menu from an American flag icon along the top of the screen. It's there in the Mail program on the new Mac, called "Special Characters" as a selection under the "Edit" heading. But I can't find it in Word, which I was willing to pay extra for rather than use Apple's Pages program which is nothing but trouble for me.

A post on this forum mentioned something called "charactermap" which sounds like it would be what I'm looking for, but again, I can't find that anywhere. Entering charactermap into the Help box yields no result.

Oh, what I would give for an old-fashioned users' manual. Can anyone here direct this Luddite simpleton toward that which he seeks?