Insert emoji

Created: 2026-07-26 · Updated: 2026-07-26

The emoji panel searches the complete set of Microsoft Fluent Emoji and places the chosen emoji onto the current slide as a lossless, scalable vector graphic (SVG). Three styles are available — Color, Flat and High Contrast — plus six skin tones for hands and people. Frequently used emojis can be saved as favourites.

Free in every edition

The emoji panel works without restriction in every licence tier, including the free version. There is no quota and no lock.

Opening

On the ribbon, go to PPPTools → „Tools" group and click Emojis (😀). The panel opens on the right.

Search and browse

Search: Type a term into the search box — it matches the emoji's English name and keywords (e.g. heart, star, thumbs up, rocket). The result list updates automatically.
Browse: With no search term, all emojis are sorted into groups (Smileys & Emotion, People & Body, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink, Travel & Places, Activities, Objects, Symbols, Flags).

Collapsible groups

Each group is a collapsible section. Without a search the groups are collapsed (only "★ Favourites" stays open), keeping the list tidy. As soon as you search, all matching groups open automatically. A group's manually chosen open/closed state is remembered.

Styles

The dropdown lets you pick one of three styles — all three are inserted as vector:

Style	Appearance
Color	Full colour, the way emojis are usually seen
Flat	Two-dimensional, solid areas, no gradients
High Contrast	Single colour, high contrast — for accessible slides

Always sharp

Because an emoji is inserted as SVG, it stays crisp at any size and can be scaled freely on the slide without becoming pixelated.

Skin tones

For hands and people, six skin tones are available (Default/Yellow, Light, Medium-Light, Medium, Medium-Dark, Dark). Pick a tone with the six colour dots in the panel; it applies to the next emoji you insert.

Hands & people only

In the Unicode standard, skin tones exist only for hands and people. Smileys and faces always stay yellow — this is by design, not a bug. For an emoji without skin tones the selection is ignored.

Skin tones are available for Color and Flat. For High Contrast, Fluent ships only a single-colour variant; a chosen tone falls back to the default there.

Favourites

Frequently used emojis can be saved as favourites:

Hover over a tile → a star appears in the top-right corner. Clicking it turns the favourite on (★) or off (☆).
All favourites appear as their own group "★ Favourites" at the top of the panel — including while searching, as long as they match the search term.
Clicking the tile itself (not the star) inserts the emoji.

Favourites are stored per user and persist across PowerPoint restarts.

Size and inserting

Size (cm) sets the edge length on the slide; the default is 3 cm. The emoji is placed in the centre of the current slide. Once inserted it can be moved, scaled and animated freely like any other graphic.

An inserted emoji is internally marked PPPTools = Emoji so that PPPTools recognises it as its own object.

Example: 1–5 rating scale

For a scale from "very happy" to "annoyed", faces can be found with these search terms:

Level	Emoji	Search term
5 – great	🤩	`star-struck`
4 – good	🙂	`slightly smiling`
3 – neutral	😐	`neutral`
2 – poor	🙁	`slightly frowning`
1 – annoyed	😡	`pouting`

Use the same style and the same size for all five faces so the scale looks consistent.

Origin and licence

The emoji graphics come from the Microsoft Fluent Emoji project and are used under the MIT License. The copyright and licence notice ships with PPPTools; the panel itself has a link to the original source at the bottom.

Notes

Search matches English names and keywords — heart finds the heart, Herz does not.
If a chosen style is ever unavailable for an emoji, PPPTools inserts the Color variant automatically and says so.
Inserting as vector requires a modern Office (SVG support). Very old Office versions report this when inserting.