A few months after adding emoji reactions to Google Docs, the company is making it easier to include them in your actual document as well. Today, it announced a new shortcut that makes it easy to insert an emoji while writing, so you don’t have to pick up your computer’s dialer or copy and paste the icons from other places.
The new system gives you several ways to get to emoji, which Google lists in this help document. The easiest is to just “@[emoji name]’, and typing ‘@emoji’ will bring up a searchable emoji picker, like the one on your phone.
You can also “@:[emoji name]”, which I have found to be the fastest and most reliable method. Typing the emoji name right after the @ symbol often brings up other functions or prompts me to name a colleague, so it’s just faster to type the colon (especially since I’m familiar with all the correct emoji names because of Slack and Rocket).
Google says that this feature will appear today for some users and that it will be rolled out to everyone by the end of September. And in case you were wondering, yes – it seems to support the most recent emoji (although obviously not the ones currently in the works).