2 New Ways To Add Emoji Reactions

About this Tutorial

Revolutionize the way you react with emojis! Discover two new methods to add emoji reactions and take your spreadsheets to the next level. Learn how to create a reaction clicker and a reaction picker to personalize your sheets with emojis. Don't miss out on this game-changing method in Google Sheets.

We're adding some emoji reactions to Google Sheets.

Sheet Resources

Access Sheet

Copy Sheet

Preview Sheet

Apps Script APIs used

Logger SpreadsheetApp

Apps Script methods used

.log() .getActiveSheet() .getActiveSpreadsheet() .getRange() .getSheetByName() .getValue() .getValues() .offset() .setValue()

Video Transcript

<div> Hey there. We're adding some emoji reactions . This was a really fun exercise because in adding emojis we have done this in the past. There's some better sheets, videos. Where we can add sort of star ratings or just add a drop down menu. And I want to go through those right now with you to share with you the old way of doing emojis reactions. And then what I discovered here or what I created, which is two new ways to add emoji reactions . One of them being a reaction clicker, where I'll show you what it does is if you click on this. Button up, button up. Thumbs up.

Or this thumbs down. It counts it here. So I'll show you again. That's four. Now it's five, and this is three, and now it becomes four. I'm gonna show you this. I'll share with you the how I did this. And then I'm also gonna share with you what, why this might not work for you. And then also, here's a reaction picker where we're gonna take the old way, which is a dropdown menu. You can see I select the up thumbs up and we get a five. So this counts here whichever emoji we're reacting with. And what's really interesting is what I'll show you here, the old way.

If we just wanna add, a thumbs up or a thumbs down to a me, some kind of message or some kind of maybe we have some creative briefs and we're just giving our reaction, we might go right click data validation . And then not even from a range , but let's just actually, let's just copy paste this. Like we'll just grab these emojis. And we'll do list of items . We've done this before. I'll save that and then just grab this one and we'll add that to it. So data validation . And we just have a list of items , which is a thumbs up, thumbs down. We'll save it.

Now we have, we can double click, we can hit the space bar. We can click the down arrow. And we have an emoji reaction, right? We can style this in a number of different ways. We can even increase the size of it. And then we can copy, paste these down and maybe clear them out. Yeah, we can make them nothing here, right? We can say, Hey, there's nothing here. Double click. Or we can set these. Up and then let someone double click and be like, no, I don't really like that. We can even, this is really cool because we can label columns.

If I want to rate things and then you want, Carl to rate things and Melissa and Fabian you can give everybody a. Here let's just style this appropriately. There we go. 20. And then give everybody let's give everybody a thumbs up to start off with. And what's really cool about this too is maybe. People can personalize their emojis, what they wanna say. There's like sparkles, there's tears, there's smiley face. I use this emojipedia to just grab whatever we want. Like maybe Fabian wants to do something like this and he can just go to data validation himself and add this here. And.

This is pretty hard to manage. But it's pretty simple. It's a, we're just creating a data validation dropdown menu, and we're selecting out of this, whatever we want. We can say Carl doesn't like that one. And we can copy each other's, emojis. You could also go data validation and instead of a list of items , you can use a list from a range . And we'll use this list of reactions here. And that gives you a set of emo emojis. You can choose. What's really cool too, is say you wanna count of them. Maybe we have, we can do this. Let's do transpose from here.

And we're just gonna take all of these here. And now we can just do account. We can do count. And what is the range in here, right? What do we wanna count? If it is this right? And this is pretty cool because then we can get a everyone's vote or something. We can see votes and we can see what happens, what's the down vote, where down vote's happening. We need to, if we wanna do this, we need to take these columns and put that dollar sign in front of. And then now we can copy paste. And also, sorry, I did this without saying.

Put the dollar sign over this four as well for this J four so that it holds that. And we can just then copy, paste this down, do the same thing here. And we have, the count of all the stuff. Let's change this to something like, I don't know how that's pronounced. Who knows? Somebody who knows. Win style is a little bit better too. And there we go. We have a count of everything. And so we know, even give these points, give like a rating here and be like, equals, you know this, or, sorry. Now rating equals this times one. We can even sum this up, right?

G five times one. What is that? K, five times negative one. L five times two. And then maybe if it's fire M five times three. And so we get a score here and that's pretty cool, right? But there's a couple of problems with this, right? It's simple, but it's not easy. It's this counting thing. It doesn't take too much time to do this. But looking at all of this and how this runs it's a bit much. Everybody gets their own. Yes we know what people did, but maybe we don't want every single person to have their own. Maybe we just want every single person to try.

So what I came up with is, Doing this where if somebody's reading something, you can just click once and it will show up here as a thumbs up. Count the number of thumbs up. Count the number of thumbs down. And that is it. How this works is these two items here are actually screenshots of these emojis. So these both are different. See, this is actually an image and I've attached a assign or I've assigned a script and this is add thumbs down. And then I think you're gonna guess what this one. This says add thumbs up.

We're gonna go to the script, so you can, if you're on your sheet, you could go to script editor . Also, if you're a Better Sheets member, you can go into the description of this video and see the sheet and copy the sheet. And you have the script wi Fit as well. So here's what this script is doing. We'll get to the picker soon. Really simple. All it's doing is getting the value in. And then adding one to it here, old value plus one, and that's it.

It's getting the value and setting the value getting the value, then setting the value as plus one, just adding one. This is slightly unscalable, meaning as it is written right now. This is coded b2. This is hard coded c2, and if you wanted to say make multiple, Rows of this one, you would have to copy this image , which is not too hard, but it's not easy and it's not programmatic.

You can't just copy pa actually, I think you cannot just, yeah, you can copy paste this, but then I think you have to then assign the script here cuz we're literally just putting an image here and then clicking this three buttons and assign script and we go. Add thumbs up. And now what's gonna happen though, over here when I click on this and I click on this, it's also hard to find where you have to click. It's adding that same one.

So one way, if like you might only have a few things to You could double double, you could copy and paste this. So we're just gonna paste this down here, and then you can label this like C b3. And so this is add thumbs up b3, and then just change this B3 and change this b3, right? And so you can copy paste this as many times as you want, obviously. Some there, there's gonna be some diminishing returns where you don't want maybe more than 10. So let's write, let's find out how we do this. We have images are very hard all when they're over the cell to figure out how to use.

So go sign script and instead of add thumbs up, we will do add thumbs up, B three, click okay. And we click this and see now it starts doing it in b3. This is actually really a good way. If you want to set these images and you only have a few and then maybe this counter is somewhere else, maybe the counter is not public information. This will allow you to do that because you literally set the sheet name , set the range . You can say, you can set something like a new sheet and say, reaction count, and then set this reaction count. And the range where you want to count them.

But again, not really programmatic, not very easy to use. But it will get you part of the way and create a little bit of magic and fun inside of your sheets the next way. So reaction picker. Here's what I did here, and this is pretty fun. So instead of having just. Single click. The one con of this is that you do have to double click. So you click on a this dropdown menu and then say, we wanna click on, we wanna react by thumbs up. Check out this thumbs up, and it goes to six. And then it resets this so that someone else can react if we hit heart.

Go from four to five and sets this. What I wanna point out though is this is pretty slow. Again, go ahead and make sure go ahead and make a copy of the sheet and and you'll have to authorize the script. But what this is using is the on edit. What we're doing is every time and this goes every single time you edit anything on. It's gonna run through this script, and it will only work if the sheet that it's on is reaction picker. So we did this here and then it will get the value of whatever you are.

This e here is like whatever value is the edit and it's grabbing the value and it's here. It says it's an emoji and it applies. It goes and looks for it in an array of emojis and. Got these from right here. So C one to F one right here. And this is just transposed. These are four that I just put here on the reactions. We have to make a few changes if we wanna add any, but maybe I'll show you that later.

But right now it's just going through these four items and saying, does whatever your edit, what whatever you edited, whatever that value is, doesn't match . And then once it matches it, it finds out where did you edit? So we're editing in this b2 and it's saying, okay, heart, we're gonna go look for the heart in here. It finds it here. And then we're gonna take this value, which is the same amount of distance from here through this array, right? This is the first one. So let's go and hit the first one and add that. If it's the thumbs down, we'll go to the second item.

And that's all we're doing here. Array. So we're looking if this array and equals something in this array, equals this emoji, then go ahead and offset it by that same amount plus one and set that value plus one. So take the value of six, add one, it's seven. So what's cool is you don't even have to have any counts here. Say this heart one, we have, this is a zero Essentially it's nothing. It's null, but also, Discussing numbers. This is zero.

So it's gonna take this heart, go look for the heart here, and it's gonna add one to zero. And then what's really cool is we also set that value of what we edited back to React. So we can set this to anything. We can set it to react. Click to react. Click me. There we go. And I'm gonna save. And we can re Now when we do the heart, it will say, click me. There we go. Now it says, click me and you can set it to whatever you want. It'll have this error because this is still a data validation and it's saying, Hey, that's not in our data validation , which is just this call here. Okay.

So what's really cool, now we have a count. This is nice and clean. It is making use of the on edit function . It's gonna be a little slow, as you can probably see in this video as I do this. It takes a second. If we go to our log, you can literally see how long it takes. In this case, it's taking one second, 1.7, 2.3 seconds, 3.2 seconds. Like sometimes it really does take a little bit of time to go through this script. Sometimes if we don't have this four loop here, scripts go very quickly. But it's.

This for Loop is making it do everything again and again until we're like, oh, there's nothing to do. Okay, so let's see. I wanna show you, in case you want to use this I already showed you how to change the text here, but what if we wanted to add an emoji? What if we wanted to add like this, face it face with tears of joy? So here's what we do, and I will do this right now in front of you so you can see. I will paste that. And so we now have another emoji, and on our reaction picker, again, this is just a transposed list of them. So here's our emoji, but what's gonna happen is nothing.

If we now, right now without doing anything else, we click that and nothing happens. We can look in our log and it'll say, completed it did what it should have done. It has, I've already logged the emoji here, so we know it's getting the right emoji. It's not doing anything. Why? Okay, we need to go into our script and we need to set a couple things. One, this emoji set right here. Maybe I can give you a little bit more room. This says to f1, if we go back to our sheet this is F1 here. We really need to go to Q one. Okay. That's the first thing. So we're gonna change this.

So I'm gonna make a little comment here. Change the G one to whatever you need to get all emojis. There we go. But now it's still not gonna work because right here we need to change I less than four to whatever. Whatever number of emojis you have, plus one for some reason, I'm, I know the reason, but this is, this needs to be five. Okay. So that's actually the number of emojis you have, nevermind. This is just not plus one. Okay. Now let's see if this works.

So we're now grabbing from the emoji set and we're comparing it correctly and our for loop is gonna actually be able to get to the last one. So let's give it a try. Let me do this one and let's see if it works. There it goes. It works. So if you need to make any changes, Script and you want to use this on edit script. I just made these comments here. So you'll need to change this G one tool, however many emojis you have, and change this ne underfund actually to the number of whatever, to the number of emojis you have. In your list.

Okay, so it's just this five and this G one you need to change and we can save that. So now those scripts are in the doc with that you might want I'm gonna change all of this to click me and why it has the data validation error is because it's not here. Excuse me. Do that so that now it says, click me and it has all of your emojis and you can add however many emojis you want, or however, few, maybe you only want to have two. But you have the scripts there. You can do the picture clicking. You can do assigning these scripts which is pretty simple. If we can.

Sometimes it'll work. There we go. That one's gonna work there. And then you can also do this picking where you can pick from a dropdown menu and it will add up the number of emojis you have here and then reset this one to click me. Hope you enjoyed this walkthrough of two new ways to add emoji reactions , bite.</div>