What to Do When Emoji Won't Copy or Come Out Broken (PC, Mobile, Excel, Word)
Why pasted emoji turn into boxes, question marks or black-and-white in Excel and Word, by symptom, with fixes you can try right away on PC, mobile and Office.
Sometimes you copy and paste an emoji and nothing shows up, or it turns into a box or a question mark, or it appears in Excel as a colorless black-and-white drawing. It feels like the copy went wrong, but in most cases the cause is the font or program where you pasted it, not the emoji itself.
This article sorts the common symptoms by cause and lays out what you can try on PC and mobile and in Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
Guessing the cause from the symptom
First, the way it breaks gives you a rough idea of the cause.
- It shows as a box (□) or a box with a question mark: The font on the device or in the program doesn't know that emoji. This commonly happens when you view a recently added emoji on an older device.
- It gets saved as a question mark (?): The input box or program you pasted into can't store emoji. You see this on old website forums and some business programs.
- It shows as a colorless black line drawing: The emoji was recognized but drawn in a black-and-white font instead of the color emoji font. It happens often in Office programs.
- One emoji splits into two or more: The device doesn't know a combined emoji that joins several emoji together.
- It won't copy at all: The web page or app blocks copying, or the emoji is in there as a picture rather than as a character.
Common causes by app and device
PC browsers
Sometimes an emoji on a web page is actually a picture file. These emoji copy as a picture, not a character, even when you drag to select them, or don't copy at all. In that case, the quick fix is to search for the emoji by name and copy the character version again.
On Windows, pressing the Windows key and the period (.) together, and on a Mac pressing Control+Command+Space, opens an emoji input panel. If copying is a hassle, you can type the emoji directly with this feature.
Mobile
If you see a box on a phone, the most common cause is that the operating system is old and doesn't know the new emoji. Updating the operating system fixes most cases. Even if your own device is up to date, if the receiver's device is old, it can look broken on their screen.
Messengers, forums and username fields
Some input fields don't accept emoji at all, or turn them into question marks when saving. There's nothing you can fix on the user's side in this case, so you have to use letters instead of an emoji or swap in a different emoji. In an input field with a character limit, a combined emoji made of several characters like 👩💻 can also get cut off partway and leave only 👩.
When ❤️ turns into a black ♥ symbol
❤️ is actually the heart symbol U+2764 followed by an invisible character U+FE0F that says "show this in emoji form." If that invisible character gets dropped while copying or pasting, then depending on the program you get a black text-style heart instead of the red heart. Emoji that started from old symbols, like ☺️ and ✔️, can have the same thing happen. In that case, copy the emoji again, and it's more reliable to use a copy button than to drag across the screen.
Why they come out black and white in Excel, Word and PowerPoint
The reasons emoji appear as black-and-white outlines in Office documents are the font and the program version.
Color emoji on Windows are drawn by a font called Segoe UI Emoji. But if a different font is assigned to the cell or paragraph, emoji that started from symbols, like ☺️ and ❤️, can show up in that font's black-and-white shape, and with an old Office that doesn't support color emoji, the emoji as a whole can show without color. The Microsoft 365 desktop apps for Windows support color emoji, but in older versions of Excel they often show only in black and white.
Printing needs care too. Even if it looks colored on screen, it naturally comes out gray on a black-and-white printer, so if color matters for the material, check ahead of time.
Fixing it with font settings
When emoji look wrong in Office, try the following in order.
- Select only the cell or text with the emoji and change the font to
Segoe UI Emoji(Windows). - On a Mac, check that the emoji font is
Apple Color Emoji. - Update Office to the latest version. Older versions may show only black and white even if you change the font.
- Check for Windows updates too. New emoji only show once the operating system's emoji font is updated.
- When you send a document to someone, remember it can look different depending on the setup of their computer.
If it still doesn't work: use the copy button and save as an image
If character-based emoji keep giving you trouble, try the features on EmojiCanvas.
Copy exactly with the copy button
There's a copy button at the very top of each emoji detail page. When you drag across the screen to copy, leading or trailing spaces and invisible characters can be dropped or mixed in, but the copy button puts the emoji character on the clipboard exactly as it is. Even combined emoji and emoji like ❤️ that come with an invisible character are copied in full. There's also a copy button next to each combo line in guides and emoji sets, and at the bottom of an article, the "Copy all emoji in this article" button lets you grab them all at once.
Save as an image and insert it
For something that has to look the same on any computer, like a PowerPoint presentation or printed material, putting the emoji in as a picture rather than a character is the surest way. On an emoji's detail page, in the designs section, press the "Save PNG" or "Save SVG" button under the three designs, Google Noto, Twemoji and Microsoft Fluent, and you can download an image file.
- PNG: An ordinary image file that's easy to drop straight into a document or slide.
- SVG: A file that doesn't break no matter how large you scale it, good for large prints and design work.
The license is shown with each image, so check it before you use it. Twemoji in particular requires credit when you use it.
Summary: suspect where you paste before the copy
When an emoji breaks, the cause is almost always not the emoji but the font, program version or input field limit where you pasted it. Remember it as boxes mean update, black and white means font and question marks mean an input field problem, and you can deal with it quickly. If it still doesn't get fixed, saving it as an image and inserting that is the surest way.
- 😀A basic emoji that's good for testing with the copy button
- ❤️A heart to check whether it changes into a black symbol
Last checked 2026-10-22