Did you know that Emojis have been around since 1997? They essentially became an integral part of most written communication methods. In this article, we are going to show you how to use emojis in Excel.
How to insert an emoji in Excel
You can insert an emoji in any application that has support for them. Word, Notepad or Paint are a few of examples, and conveniently, Excel also has this support. However, the places you can use emojis are a bit more limited in Excel. Let’s take a closer look.
Keyboard shortcut
You can open the emojis dialog when you start typing in a cell, a chart title, or a SmartArt label. Press the appropriate key combination depending to your operating system. There are two methods you can use in Windows.
Windows:
- Win + ;
- Win + .
MacOS
Command + Control + Space
Virtual (Touch) Keyboard
You may have noticed this before if your computer supports touch keyboards. Due to the lack of a physical keyboard, some key combinations are not available on touch devices. However, there is a dedicated button on your virtual keyboards in Windows. You can find the virtual keyboard in the task bar.
Click on the icon to display the keyboard. You can find the emoji key near the bottom-left corner.
Excel Formulas
Every emoji is encoded as a character in Unicode standard, and has a hexadecimal code. You can use the HEX2DEC and UNICHAR functions to display an emoji if you know its code.
The main function is the UNICHAR which returns a Unicode character of a given numeric value. Since the numeric value should be decimal-based number, any hexadecimal value should be converted into a decimal number. As the name suggests, the HEX2DEC function can help with this conversion.
Here is an example:
Once, you generate the emoji, you can copy and paste it as a value, and use it however you'd like! 🤘
You can access a detailed list of hexadecimal values here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji.
Where you can use emojis in Excel
In cells
To take it one step further, you can use emojis with pretty much any formula that accepts text data as an argument.
For example, the formulas below are pointing to the cell I5, which has an emoji.
In worksheet names
Emojis can be used in worksheet names.
In slicers
Although the slicers are commonly used with Pivot Tables, you can use them with Excel Tables as well. Please see this page to learn more about this feature: Slicers in Excel Tables
In charts
Excel supports emojis in charts as well. You can utilize emojis and symbols to enhance your charts.
