Using Emojis in Dynamics

Dynamics does allow emojies. It’s just that, and I’m not sure why nobody else(myself included) spotted this interesting feature before Meagan Walker did it in her blog post:

http://meganvwalker.com/using-emojis-in-optionset-fields/

So I could not help but to dig a bit more into it. Turns out you can use emojis pretty much anywhere in Dynamics (and not only with Dynamics), at least when using it with a web browser:

This will also work in the Unified Interface, though I did not try it with the mobile apps – it may or may not work.

Why is it working is an interesting question. Those emojies are not “images” – they are special characters/symbols provided with the font. And, as it turns out, Dynamics is using fonts that support emojis naturally:

As you can see on the screenshot, it’s Segoe UI Emoji that’s rendered there, and it does support emojis, or, at least, some of them.

One caveat with this is that, depending on which fonts you have installed in your system, the same emojis may be displayed differently (or, possibly, they won’t be displayed at all). For example, if you look at the screenshot below, you’ll see how it’s the same screen, but it’s a different font. So it’s the same emojis, but they have different visuals now:

There is a Microsoft Support article that you may try if/when you run into this kind of weird emojis:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4021341/emojis-are-not-displayed-in-office-applications-in-windows-7

Basically, it’s all about getting the right font installed (which, unfortunately, I could not really try in this particular environment because of some limitations).