I’m having trouble with emoji characters in my Google Sheets document. Sometimes the emojis display perfectly fine in the spreadsheet itself, but other times they just appear as blank squares. The bigger problem happens when I try to export my sheet as a PDF file - all the emoji symbols turn into weird lines instead of showing the actual icons.
I copied the emoji from an online emoji reference site and pasted it directly into my cell. In the browser it looks okay most of the time, but the PDF export is completely broken. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a specific way I should be adding emojis to make sure they export properly?
I really need these symbols to show up correctly in my PDF reports. Any suggestions on how to fix this would be super helpful. Thanks for any advice you can give me!
It’s unfortunate, but this issue with emoji display in Google Sheets when exporting to PDF is a common one. The PDF conversion process often doesn’t fully support certain Unicode characters, which is why you’re seeing those odd symbols instead. I’ve found a workaround that might help. Instead of using emojis, consider substituting them with simple text symbols. For instance, use asterisks or other basic characters that are more reliably rendered in PDFs. Additionally, you could leverage the Special Characters feature in Google Sheets, which tends to maintain compatibility better than copy-pasting emojis from external sites. If all else fails, exporting your sheets as images before converting them to PDF can preserve the appearance, albeit at the cost of text selectability.
Try unicode escape codes instead of copy-pasting emojis. Way better for PDF exports. Like =CHAR(128522) for a smiley instead of . More work but PDFs actually render them right.
Had this same issue last month with quarterly reports. It’s a font compatibility problem - Google Sheets uses system fonts that don’t handle emojis well when converting to PDF. I fixed it by changing the font in those cells to Noto Color Emoji before exporting (Format > Font). If you don’t have that font, try Segoe UI Emoji or Apple Color Emoji depending on your system. Another trick that saved me tons of time: use Google Docs instead for anything with emojis, then export to PDF from there. Docs handles Unicode way better during conversion. The font switch fixed about 90% of my emoji problems.
. More work but PDFs actually render them right.