Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine life before the advent of digitalization. It has an impact on almost every aspect of our daily lives, and much of our communication takes place online. Naturally, facial expressions and body language, which both have a large influence on a conversation, are absent in the digital world. Because emails only transmit information in written form, there is a risk that the recipient will misinterpret the tone and context. This is especially true for emails dealing with emotional topics.
The solution? Adding smileys to reduce the possibility of text message misinterpretation. In addition, smileys can be used to make text messaging more enjoyable and personal. This article will teach you how to add smileys to Outlook for better digital communication.
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Using smileys in Outlook: What are the options?
Because electronic smileys were originally just ASCII characters, they work with all message types, including emails. This archetypal smiley is distinguished by its punctuation mark construction: the combination:-) produces a joyful smiley, while the combination:-( represents a sad facial expression. When you compose an email, Outlook automatically replaces some of these character string smileys, known as emoticons, with appropriate pictograms (graphical representations) – these types of smileys are commonly referred to as emojis.
How to add Smileys in Outlook?
The details of how the options work depend on the version of the email client used – the revised fonts and emoji models, in particular, are important. You can learn how to add smileys in Outlook 2016 and Outlook 2013 in the sections below.
How to add smileys in Outlook 2016: step-by-step instructions
If you are unfamiliar with emoticons and thus do not know the standard character combinations, you can use the smileys available in Outlook 2016 as symbols in your emails instead.
Step 1: Firstly, start writing a new email, switch to the “Insert” tab and look for the “Symbols” entry in the menu bar.
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Step 2: Click the “Icon” button, then click “More Symbols” to open the menu of the same name:
Step 3: Select “Segoe UI Emoji” as the desired font.
Step 4: Switch to the “Extended Characters – Code Range 1” subset to go directly to the numerous emoji symbols in the font. If you then scroll down a little further, you will also find a list of the available smileys, which are still displayed in black and white at this point. However, as soon as you add one of these Outlook smileys to your message, you will see the colored version.
Step 4: Select the emoji you want and then press “Insert”.
Import your own Smileys in Outlook
If the available Outlook smileys do not meet your needs in terms of selection or appearance, you can import smileys generated by other users or smileys you’ve created yourself and use them in your emails.
For example, Outlook 2016 provides an interface to Bing through which you can search for any online image indexed by the search engine.
Step 1: In the first step, go to the “Insert” tab and click on “Online images”.
Step 2: Then enter “Smiley” in the search bar and start the search with the magnifying glass symbol.
Step 3: Select the desired image with a left-click and then import it into your message via “Insert”.
With these instructions, you should be able to easily insert smileys and thus better express yourself – and let’s face it, messages with smileys and symbols are just more fun!
Do you use smileys often? Or do you think they’re unprofessional?
Feel free to discuss this further in the comment section!
See you soon!
Aline & the Lookeen team
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