How to use Emojis in your Communicates

Gimbal's Communicate functionality supports Emoji characters for both Time-based and Place-based Communicates.  This means that you can add Emojis to both the Title and Description of your Communicates.

You can add Emojis to your communicates either by using an Emoji-based keyboard supported by your operating system or by copying and pasting Emoji characters from any other editor that supports them. We do support Emojis for both Communicates created within the Gimbal Manager web portal as well as Communicates created via our REST API.  Communicate data exports also support Emojis though they are not rendered by default since they are based on the UTF-8 encoding scheme.

Using Emojis in your Communicates

To add an Emoji to your Communicate Title and/or Description: 

• On a Mac: Pressing <Control><Command><Space> simultaneously should open the Emoji Keyboard
• On Windows 10: Click on the Touch Keyboard icon in your task bar (located in the bottom right corner of your screen), then click the smiley face emoji icon
• Once you find the Emoji you want to use, copy and paste it into your Communicate Title and/or Description, as appropriate

Additional information can be found at:

• https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25337?locale=en_US
• https://www.gottabemobile.com/how-to-use-Emoji-on-windows-10-windows-8-and-windows-7/

Rendering Emojis in your Export Data:  

Emojis are based on the UTF-8 encoding scheme so while you can export a 'communicate-events' report that contains Emojis, the Emojis themselves will not render by default if you open the CSV file normally.

You can force them to render using functions available in a tool like Microsoft Excel, but the added rendering time may cause performance issues when looking at the data.  If the rendering is taking too long, we recommend reducing the size of the data you're attempting to render.

To open your 'communicate-events' report that contains Emojis and have them rendered, you can follow these steps provided for Microsoft Excel for Mac 2017.  If you're using a different tool, realize that the export data files are comma delimited and need to rendered using Unicode (UTF-8).

1. Open Microsoft Excel for Mac 2017 and create a 'Blank Workbook'
2. From the 'Data' pulldown menu, choose 'Get External Data' followed by 'Import Text File...'
3. Choose your 'communicate_events' data export file and click 'Get Data'
4. Within the Text Import Wizard - Step 1 of 3,
   • choose 'Delimited'
   • For File origin: choose 'Unicode (UTF-8)'
   • Click 'Next >'
5. Within the Text Import Wizard - Step 2 of 3,
   • Under Delimiters, choose 'Comma'
   • Click 'Next >'
6. Within the Text Import Wizard - Step 3 of 3,
   • Under Column data format, choose 'General'
   • Click 'Finish'
7. When prompted where you to put the data, choose either an existing sheet or new sheet and click 'OK'
8. While it may take some time (as indicated by the 'Preparing Worksheet' status in the tray), Excel will eventually render your Communicate Export Data including Emojis that were sent in a given Communicate