Using Emojis in Field Labels

This is a big shout out to Megan Walker who wrote a nice article about Using Emojis in Optionsets with Dynamics 365 which is well worth checking out.
It reminded me of something we’ve been doing on some Entity Forms for a while to make things more visual.

Dynamics 365 forms can be an uninspiring place. Using emoji on Field Labels to more clearly define Addresses, Phone Numbers etc is an easy way to spice things up. I’m a firm believer that we are ‘visual creatures’, and our brains respond much faster (in relative terms) to images.

I’ve mostly just searched Google for “text symbol” and “phone” or anything else I’d like.
There are huge libraries of these around, but I try to keep it simple.

Getting it done

To add these is very straightforward for someone with sufficient System Customizer or System Administrator privileges.

Editing the Entity Form:

Double-clicking on the field will open the Field Properties.
From the Details Tab we can change the Form Label:

**It’s worth noting that you can edit the Form Label on an Entity Form independently of the actual Field Display Name itself in the database.

If you only edit the Form Label then the change will only display on the Form. If you wish to have the emoji/symbol appear all over the System you may need to do both.

On the Details Tab, click through to Edit the Field itself and change the Field Display Name:

We can open up the default solution (via System > Customizations > Customize the System), or any Solution that contains your entity, and edit the Fields from here also. This won’t change the Form Labels for the fields if they are already present on a Form. Also note that by changing the Display Name we are not going to cause any issues for Javascript/Plugins that may have been written to manipulate these fields, as they would refer to the “Name”.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve added the symbol to the Field Display Name (not just on the Form Label) then it also carries over to other areas of the system. eg. Views/Subgrids:

The column headers include your symbols, once again making them visually stand out.

…and Export To Excel:

I’ve not had any issues re-importing data with these symbols contained in headers.

Anything that can improve the visual impact, and ease-of-use in Dynamics 365 is a good thing in my book.