Windows 10 Emojis

At any time, nearly anywhere in Windows 10, if you want to add an emoji, perhaps a smiley or an arrow, whatever, there's a really easy way to do it:

Press the Windows key and dot "." at the same time!

Here's what you'll see. At the top you'll notice three categories, a smiley, a text smiley and a symbol:

For each of those categories there are sub-categories at the bottom of the window. There's a lot to explore!

To add an emoji to your current application at the cursor, click the emoji you want. 

Here's that smiley you see in the above screen shot: 😀

Here's a computer emoji inserted directly into this blog article: 💻

Sometimes emojis look different

Here's an example of how an emoji appears in Gmail:

Below I inserted the same smiley into Notepad:

There's a difference, in Notepad (and therefore plain text) we see a monochrome version of the emoji. Emojis will usually appear the same but sometimes, depending on the application you are using, their appearance may vary. These emojis are standard in the unicode character set but it depends on how applications interpret them. If you are working on something important, I would recommend you test before publishing the final version.

For example, I have tested with Adobe Experience Manager (for intranet pages) and most emojis appear correctly. However, some don't have the same colour. There's a phone emoji that's red but appears black, odd things like that. You'll have to experiment. 

Emojis may also appear different on other platforms, like on Android, iOS or Linux for example. For example, I found when viewing the icons on a Windows 7 PC, the icons appear but are black and white. I've not systematically tested myself but what do you see when you view these emojis? Do they appear correctly compared to the screen shots I've included here?

😀😁😂🤣😃😄😅😆

Another example

The above is me selecting the man technologist 👨‍💻. It's nice they all have names. This is important because you can search for them by clicking the magnifying glass icon and typing. Type "man" for example, this one will appear in a short list.

Symbols

I think the symbols are also useful, to get to symbols, at the top I clicked Ω

This has lots of useful symbols. At the bottom click $, it shows all currency symbols. Click Ç you have accented characters - useful if you need to write in another language but you don't want to switch keyboard layouts.  

Conclusion

It's a really nice feature. There are many emojis included, perhaps too many for this little window they provide and the vertical scroll bar that means there's a lot to look through. But of course once you get used to it and where to find your favourites, it's fine. There is a Recently used category, the clock bottom left 🕒.