Sometimes when you're on a great Chromebook or a great ChromeOS tablet browsing social media or sending messages to your colleagues, there's the need to be extra expressive. You might want to send out a generic old-school ":)" or ":(" text emoji to express happiness or sadness, or some other type of text emoji.

But did you know you can spice things up a bit and send an actual visual emoji, rather than a text one? A recent update to ChromeOS made this quite a simple task. All you need to do is hit a certain keyboard combination to trigger an emojis picker, just as you might on a great Windows laptop.

How to use emoji on a Chromebook

The easiest way to use emojis on a Chromebook is to use the pre-set keyboard combination, available in any part of ChromeOS (the browser, Android apps, or Linux apps). If you're on a ChromeOS tablet, things are easier. Just tap the emoji button (the smiley face) on the virtual keyboard to bring up emojis.

This emoji picker feature for Chromebooks was introduced in ChromeOS 111, so make sure your Chromebook is updated to the latest release before proceeding. You can do this by clicking on the time in the lower right corner of the screen, and choosing the settings gear. From there, choose About ChromeOS and then Check for Updates. You might be prompted to restart your Chromebook. Once set, follow the steps below to trigger the emoji picker.

  1. On your keyboard, Press the Everything button (the circular icon to the middle left of the keyboard), Shift and Space buttons all at once.
  2. The special charger and emoji selector will appear.
  3. Click on the smiley face to see various smiley and emotions, and click on the other tabs to switch themes and see different emoji.

That's it! Similar to the keyboard combination on Windows for emojis (Windows Key + Space) you don't need to worry about having a list of emojis to copy and paste from on your Chromebook. There's a native special characters picker that you can summon to help you express yourself no matter which app you're using. We hope that you found this useful.