Emojis, or alternative conditional formatting
I'm not a particularly heavy emoji user when I text or email. However, when it comes to Power Apps and Power BI, I love having access to emojis.
They're pictorial, they're information-dense, and they're treated just like text by the browser. It's great! Here are some of my uses for emojis.
In place of conditional formatting
One thing that I noticed quickly in data tables within Power Apps was that it wasn't possible to colour individual rows conditionally like you can in Excel. Like the many of us wo were born and raised in Excel, some of my users just wanted to see "that row in red", or at least in bold.
Here is where I turn to emojis.
For example, the red heavy exclamation ❗ has a similar effect of making the text red, or bold, or both. Let's say that we have a table, with a column of dates in it. Today is the 10th of June.
| title | dueDate |
|---|---|
| Thing 1 | 02/06/2021 |
| Thing 2 | 03/06/2021 |
| Thing 3 | 17/06/2021 |
We want to "highlight" the late items. Here, we would expect Thing 1 and Thing 2 to be indicated. In the .Text property for the dueDate column, I would have...
If(ThisItem.dueDate < Today(), "❗ ") & ThisItem.dueDate
The ❗ will only appear for the items where the dueDate was less that Today(). Remember to enclose the emoji in double-quotes - it is still a string after all.
| title | dueDate |
|---|---|
| Thing 1 | ❗ 02/06/2021 |
| Thing 2 | ❗ 03/06/2021 |
| Thing 3 | 17/06/2021 |
"Traffic lights"
These symbols provide a ready-made traffic light system. Uses these in place of verbose status words and cut down on space. 🔴🟠🟡🟢
Other uses
Get creative! These are just some of the other uses that I've done but there are plenty of other indications that can be performed with emojis and other Unicode characters.
Where can I get emojis?
This might look like a trivial question, but I actually have a preference. I used to go to websites like Unicode-tables, but I didn't like having to load in a w h o l e website just to fetch a single character.
I stumbled upon the official Unicode emoji data files (at the time of writing, the latest version was v14.0). I downloaded the file emoji-test.txt, and I instantly had all the emojis I could ever want, in a text file under 1MB.
My priority is being able to access it quickly and keeping my resource usage lightweight. Bypassing the browser and the download time makes a world of difference.