Display Emojis in Your Dashboards

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About this lesson

Did you know that Excel can display Emojis in the worksheet? Why not leverage that ability to help convey your message?

Quick reference

Display Emojis In Your Dashboards

Adding Emojis to add feeling to your dashboard.

When to use

When you want a bit more of an expressive display to show your performance, Emojis can be the perfect touch.

Instructions

Identifying your Emoji

  • Emojis are identified using a hexadecimal code that looks similar to this:  1F602
  • To find an Emoji supported in Excel, download the Emoji Identifier spreadsheet
  • Locate the Emoji you want, and build its code by adding its column identifier to the value in column C

Returning an Emoji to your dashboard

  • The syntax to return an Emoji to your dashboard is as follows:
    • UNICHAR(HEX2DEC("Emoji Hex Code"))
  • For example, to return the “see no evil” monkey, you would use:
    • =UNICHAR(HEX2DEC("1F648"))

Hints & tips

  • You can use Emojis in an IF or other logical function to return conditional Emojis as well
  • The following formula will return a happy face if the value in A5 is greater than 1,000, an angry face if the value is less than -1,000 and a straight face if in between:
    • =IF(A5>1000,UNICHAR(HEX2DEC("1F604")),IF(A5<-1000, UNICHAR(HEX2DEC("1F620")),UNICHAR(HEX2DEC("1F610"))))
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  • 00:04 If you text a lot, or if you have family members that do,
  • 00:07 you probably recognize that emojis are a pretty popular way of expressing how we
  • 00:12 feel about a particular thing.
  • 00:15 Now as it turns out, Excel will allow us to actually use emojis as well.
  • 00:20 The trick is, you have to know which functions to use, and
  • 00:22 that happens to be the UNICHAR function.
  • 00:25 Now the UNICHAR function unfortunately takes a decimal number, and
  • 00:29 most emojis that we know of are actually stored in hexadecimal codes.
  • 00:34 But there's a function to convert from one to the other called HEX2DEC.
  • 00:38 Now inside here I am going to choose which emoji I actually want to provide
  • 00:43 based on the variance.
  • 00:45 So that's gonna be if my variance is greater than 0,
  • 00:51 then I'm going to use the hexidecimal code 1F600, I'll close the parenthesis.
  • 00:58 If it's not greater than 0,
  • 01:00 then in that case I'm gonna use a different code of 1F640.
  • 01:04 And I'm gonna close my quotes, close my if statement,
  • 01:08 close my HEX2DEC, and close my UNICHAR function as well.
  • 01:13 And at this point I can hit Enter,
  • 01:14 and what you'll see is that I get this horrified cat emoji
  • 01:18 that doesn't look very happy with the actual value that's showing up.
  • 01:22 If I go and change from Tents to say Sleeping Bags,
  • 01:25 we have a positive variance, so we have a nice happy face.
  • 01:28 So that's a good way of actually showing a little bit emotion on the dashboard,
  • 01:32 especially if you're working with a younger audience that tends to get stuck
  • 01:36 in on these things.
  • 01:37 But the big question it comes down to, well,
  • 01:39 where the heck do you find these codes that you can use in here?
  • 01:43 What I'm I gonna do in order to locate those?
  • 01:46 So we've actually included a nice little utility here for
  • 01:50 an emoji generator where you can actually figure out which emojis are which.
  • 01:55 This uses an entire spreadsheet to show you
  • 01:57 all of the different emojis that are available.
  • 01:59 So the key that you really need to do is figure out which emoji is it that I want.
  • 02:04 You can scroll down the list and you can see what's here.
  • 02:06 So in this case here, the monkey we can see, the hexadecimal code for
  • 02:11 this is 1F43, and then we add the value at the top, for 5.
  • 02:16 So when you type in your 1F435 It returns the monkey for you.
  • 02:21 If I wanted to have something different for
  • 02:23 my dashboard, maybe I wanna scroll down and say, hey, here,
  • 02:26 this one, this looks fantastic with the laughing with tears.
  • 02:31 What I can do is I can say, all right, he is 1F60, and
  • 02:35 he's from the second column, is this the one?
  • 02:39 That is absolutely the one, so
  • 02:41 this is what I feed into my UNICHAR function, =UNICHAR(HEX2DEC(the
  • 02:45 five digit code that I have here) will return this particular guy.
  • 02:49 And you can actually see it working exactly this way right here.
  • 02:53 So the key at this point is really scroll through, figure out which ones you want.
  • 02:57 This is a beautiful candidate for a horrifying number, I think.
  • 03:01 I would say that you probably wanna keep them professional,
  • 03:03 that might be something you wanna keep in mind.
  • 03:05 But overall, it's a neat tool to add a little bit of spice and
  • 03:09 a little bit of flair to your dashboard.
  • 03:10 So download the emoji generator and have a little look at it and
  • 03:14 see which ones you actually wanna use.
  • 03:16 You know what, I can guarantee you it'll definitely raise some eyebrows at work.

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