13 Alternate Ways To Use Emoji On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at alternative uses for emoji on your Mac. 

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So you probably already use emoji in things like text messages, emails, commenting on websites, social media and all of that. But there's other ways you could use these special characters on your Mac. Let's look at thirteen unusual but very useful ways to use emoji on your Mac. 

The Bookmarks Bar at the top of Safari is really useful but doesn't include little icons to represent each website like say Tabs do. But you could include emoji in the names here. So you can see here I have several bookmarks and they have little symbols next to them. All I've done there is I've added emoji to the names. So I'm just typing like I would normally except now I'm inserting emoji characters instead of letters. For instance here in this one I can select it. I'll click it again to edit the name and before the name I'm going to do Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji and Symbol viewer here. Then I could search for something that fits. So I'll look for Cloud here and here's a symbol I want to use. I'll just double click that. It inserts it in just like I typed that as a letter. Now I have that as something up here. This works great for bookmarks especially for things like folders. So for News here, for instance, I can insert a symbol to represent a newspaper. Now I have one here for this folder of bookmarks.

Now of course you can do the same thing with File and Folder names in the Finder. This could really help for two reasons. First it makes some folders and files standout because they have these little symbols in them here. So here I have a folder of Restaurant Reviews and I put a little hamburger there. Golf scorecards I have a little golfer there. Not only does it make the folder and file standout but when I'm sorting alphabetically the emoji characters are going to come first so these two pop to the top. I suppose if I didn't want them to do that I could simply put that symbol at the end of the name instead.

Now you can enlarge emoji characters quite a bit so you can use them as Clipart. You could think of them as a clipart collection you have available in just about any app you use. So here in Pages all I did was create a regular text box and insert one character into it. That was the emoji character here for a bento box. You can see I brought that up all the way to 120 pt. and it looks great. I set the wrapping for this so the text wraps around it. It looks just like a little piece of clipart. You can do the same thing in Keynote. Here I have a slide where I've also put a text box and inserted an emoji as a colorful piece of clipart on a slide. I didn't have to get any images. I didn't have to download anything, or have a clipart collection ready. I could just use an emoji character.

Now in Numbers you could do this the same thing. You could use emoji as clipart. But you could also do more complex things like, for instance, here I have a customer satisfaction table with a name and then a rating from 1 to 10. Then I use a symbol to match that. So I have this little symbol table here and I'm simply using a lookup formula. The formula here is simply lookup using the rating column here from this symbol's table, so looking in column A for the match, and then column B to grab the emoji. You could use any kind of symbol you want there. It doesn't have to be a rating system. You could have something there like what's your favorite sport. You can have skiing, baseball, football, etc., and then use a lookup table for this to put the emoji symbol for that sport in the next column.

You may already use emoji in your email messages but there are two other ways I see using it in email that's useful. First a lot of people don't consider using it as a subject line. Here I have it in a subject line and it might make that email stand out a little more. Also you can use it in the Signature. So here I have a signature and the signature is using an emoji character. You can setup these signatures in Mail Preferences and you setup a signature here and then you add it to your different accounts. So I've created the signature. This is where I have actually typed the emoji to appear in here. The thing I like about this is a lot of people try to include images in their signature which means that every single email that you send out has an attachment. Which is kind of annoying if you're getting lots of emails from that person. You're getting all these emails with attachments all the time. But emoji character isn't an attachment. It doesn't really take up any extra space yet it still adds a little bit of interesting color to your signature.

Another place you can use emoji is when you're proofreading or editing a document or just somebody asks you for feedback. So here I've opened up a document in Preview. I've used Markup. I insert a text box and I have a couple of text boxes here where I've just put a single emoji character show that I like something or don't like something or something is really cool. You can use all the different symbols to represent different things.

There's also no reason you can't use emoji in your Calendar events. So here I've got a calendar event for vacation and I've simply added a cool little emoji here in the title and it appears there. Another one here for a single event. If you're sharing a calendar with somebody they should see it too on their Mac so they may notice that event a little more because of the emoji character in the event title.

You can also use emoji in Playlist Names and the Music app. So here, for instance, I've created a playlist and all I've done is added a little guitar emoji here for the playlist which helps it standout. You can see it appears here in the left sidebar as well. That should appear on my iPhone when I bring up this playlist too. The same thing with the Photos app. It's not really that necessary because you're going to get a little photo thumbnail for every album that you create but you certainly can use emoji in the names of your albums. You can also use them in the titles of photos if you want. 

Here back in Pages you can also use emoji as bullets for bullet lists. So if I select a bullet list like this and I go into the right sidebar under Bullets and Lists I can type any character I want or choose from some defaults for a bullet. But because I can type any character I want I can select an emoji. So, for instance, if this happens to be a list about baseball I can assign a baseball as the bullet and you can see here that now I've got that instead. So it makes it a little more interesting and fun.

You can use them in iMovie too. So here I've created a title. Just a simple centered title here. Instead of typing text I put an emoji character. Centered Title is very useful because you can left justify it to put it to the left, right justified to put it to the right. You can insert a few extra lines before it, for instance, and move it to the right to put it at the bottom right hand corner. You can go to the top left corner by putting extra lines after. So you can kind of work to position it anywhere you want. Putting a little quick emoji title is kind of a fun special effect that you can add to your iMovie projects. It would work in just about any other video editing software as well as long as you could add a text overlay of some kind like a title you can use an emoji character to express an emotion or something else in a video.

So in the Contacts app if you don't know someone's last name, a lot of times people will put something like Joe softball team, but then because it's text you may not notice it there and even after you learn that person's last name you may not think to change it. But if you actually used an emoji character that shows your relationship with that person, like in this case a softball as this person's on your softball team, then later on when you do learn their last name you can remember to change it. Even if you do know their last name it might be worthwhile to leave the little character there at the end of their last name. That way you have a way to remember your relationship with that person.

So here's an odd one. I'm not sure how useful this is but if you were looking for a local pizza place you might search for the word pizza. But you could also enter the emoji character for pizza. Now in this case I have to type the name there to find the emoji so it really doesn't save me any time. Once I do that it is in my Favorites. So I can search for pizza place like that and sure enough it works. If I do it again you can see it's under Frequently Used so it's actually only a keyboard shortcut and a click to get pizza there rather than typing it out. So does save you some time. It works for a variety of things so I can search for a burger place as well. Sports, all sorts of things. Basically it's just going to take the official name for that emoji and apply that to the search. The same search items also work in Spotlight as well.

There are probably many other ways that you could also use emoji throughout your Mac. Pretty much anywhere that you need text to standout you could substitute emoji characters for text to accomplish that. I'd love to hear some creative ways that you've used emoji on your Mac. Tell me in the comments below.