This has the potential to be dangerous. ? I was writing an email to a friend and wanted it to be perfectly clear that what I was writing was joke. I find the purely textual emoticons such as the sideways smiley 🙂 are often mistaken for punctuation and their intent lost, so I wanted to use a graphical emoji. We both use GMail, but I don’t care for the “melted lump” characters Google put in there.

On a whim, I did a search for how to type emoji on windows 10 and found a PC World article explaining how to type emoji if you have the Fall Creators Update. My immediate thought was to wonder if it was safe to assume everyone had it yet, and then I realized the article was from 2017! So the feature’s been there for a while and I just didn’t know about it.

So, if you on Windows 10, you can type emoji by pressing the Windows Key, followed by either the period or the semi-colon, and an emoji keyboard will appear. This is much more convenient – and universal – than any per-website or per-application emoji button.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a huge fan of emoji, but sometimes you just really want to type ? or ✈ without first visiting emojipedia. ?

(Only bummer on this is GMail replaces the emoji characters with the “melted lump” equivalents.)

By the way, Mac users can do the same by pressing and holding down both the [Control] and [Command] keys and then hitting the space bar.

Image by Pixaline from Pixabay. Used under the Pixabay license.