Add the happy face emoji into Excel

If you want, you can add the happy face emoji into Excel as shown below in the status column.

Add happy face emoji into Excel

This is easy to do but there are 2 steps. The first step is to get the happy, neutral and sad face emojis to show up and then we can add the colours.

YouTube Show Happy Face Emoji in Excel

Show Happy, Neutral and Sad emoji in Excel

All you need to do is change your font.

As shown below, highlight the cells that will contain the emojis and change the font to Wingdings.

To get the faces you can just now either type, or better, create an IF formula, that results in a

  • J- Happy face emoji (note it is a capital J not a small j- same for the others below)
  • K- Neutral face emoji
  • L- Sad face emoji

Change the colours of the emojis (automatically)

After the above steps you will have the emojis in black and white. To add colours you make use of conditional formatting.

The steps would be:

  • Highlight the relevant cells (F2 to F8 below)
  • Go to the HOME ribbon, click on the CONDITIONAL FORMAT dropdown
  • Choose HIGHLIGHT CELL RULES and the EQUAL TO
Add happy face emoji into Excel
  • Type the letter you want to colour. Below we have used J as we want to tell Excel to colour the happy face emoji green.
  • Click on the format box and change it to ‘Custom Format’
Add happy face emoji into Excel
  • Choose the format you want. In this case we want the font colour to change to green, but you can make multiple changes to the format.
  • Click OK until you are back at the main screen and your happy face emojis should have all turned green.
Add happy face emoji into Excel

You need to repeat the process for the neutral (yellow) and sad (red) face emojis remembering to highlight all the relevant cells each time.

Add tick/ cross into your Data Validation and use it in IFs and Conditional Formatting

Edit with arrows keys not working in Conditional Formatting