Who doesn’t love emoji’s?! They’ve been around for years and very common place across digital platforms, the Power Platform is no different. This article will show you how to add them to your canvas apps and show some possible use cases. Let’s add some fun to our design and user experiences!
In canvas apps, emoji’s are text-based. This means you need to interact with text-based inputs in controls to leverage them. This could be things like the text property of a Text Label control or the default property of a Text Input control.
I’ve added a label control to my Power App. To access the emoji’s, I’ll need to have the Text property selected:
Remove the existing text. With your cursor in the fx bar for the Text property, on your keyboard, hold down the Windows key and press the period/full stop key:
You’ll then see the following box appear, where you can search for and add emoji’s and other symbols:
Easy, right? Just to clarify, these are text-based entries so you’ll need to wrap whatever emoji’s within double quotes. Without them, you’ll get the red squiggly line of doom:
With double quotes either side:
A few examples
Here’s a couple of quick examples that I’ve found myself using more and more.
The Hint Text property on Text Input controls is great for things like a Search emoji:
The Text property for buttons also work, such as this Floppy Disc emoji:
If you caught my previous post on making a two-level menu component, you’ll have seen use of emoji’s there to liven up the menu:
You can also inject some personality into drop downs, combo boxes, radio controls and list boxes:
ClearCollect(colEmojis,
[
"🧠 Brain",
"🫀 Heart",
"🫁 Lungs",
"🦄 Unicorns"
])
A quick note if you use these – they can render differently depending on the device used. Please keep that in mind when adding to your Apps.
A really quick & simple way to breath some life into your canvas apps. Hopefully you can find a good excuse to use them and if you have any other useful scenarios, please let me know in the comments below!
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