If you’re wondering how to remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams chat, you’re not alone. After a quick search, I found hundreds of commenters on Microsoft’s community forums, Reddit, and other channels all asking the same question.

While emojis can be a fun way to express yourself in Microsoft Teams, just like GIFs, stickers, and reactions, you probably don’t want to use them all the time.

Maybe you want to make a professional impression when chatting with a client on Teams, or avoid having an animated emoticon automatically appear every time you type a keyboard shortcut.

Here’s what you need to know about managing emojis in Microsoft Teams.

Why remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams?

If you’ve come across this article, you probably already have a reason to want to remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams. However, some people still don’t see the appeal.

Many people love emojis and emoticons. Microsoft Teams users have been requesting the ability to create their own custom emojis for some time now—a feature Microsoft only recently introduced. While emojis are great, the fact that they automatically appear in Microsoft Teams whether you want them to or not is annoying.

Microsoft’s animated emoticons for Teams automatically appear in your chat when you type a certain key combination, meaning you have to constantly pay attention to what you’re typing.

Suppose you are working with long lines of code and need to type something into a chat with a colleague. The last thing you want is

Or maybe you’re working with a design team and want to reference something in parentheses, like (jar). You probably don’t want that replaced by an animated jar either.

Can you remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams?

So what’s the solution if you’re fed up with all those animated smileys and images? Unfortunately, there isn’t one – at least not a practical one. Microsoft has addressed many customers complaining about the automated emojis on their community forum. However, they haven’t introduced an option to “disable” emoticons.

As far as I know, you can only remove an emoji by Ctrl+Z on your keyboard to undo the automatic replacement of your text. This is fine if you’re only sending one or two messages, which may contain sections that are automatically converted to emoticons.

However, if you write long messages with lots of brackets and possible keyboard shortcuts, you will waste a lot of time typing them all manually using CTRL+Z.

After some searching on forums like Reddit, I came across a user who said that in chat you can use the keyboard shortcut > to enter “literal” text, which sometimes prevents the emoticon from appearing. However, I tried it several times and it didn’t work for me.

What can you do about Microsoft Teams emoticons?

As far as I know, there is no simply Ability to remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams on a mass scale, but there are still a few things you can do to manage your messaging policies.

For example, the first thing I would recommend is giving feedback to Microsoft. The company regularly releases updates, patches and features based on customer requests.

One way is to head to the Microsoft Community forum and share your thoughts there. Alternatively, you can provide feedback directly from the Teams client by clicking Settings and more (…) then Help and click on Suggest a function or Give feedback.

Another step you should take as an individual Microsoft Teams user is to turn off the animations for Microsoft Teams emoticons. Again, this won’t stop your text from automatically turning into a smiley, but at least you won’t have annoying animations.

To do this, sign in to Microsoft Teams and click (…) next to your organization name and profile picture. Click Settings and click on Appearance and accessibility.

Scroll down to animation and switch the option Disable animations The next time you go into your Teams chat, you’ll see that your emojis have been replaced with static, simple emoticons.

I know it’s not a real “solution”, but it’s something.

Removing other expression features from Teams

Although you can’t remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams, there are several ways for administrators to control how users can express themselves when using Teams chat.

As a Microsoft Teams admin, you can create messaging policies that you can assign to entire teams, specific people, or specific groups. These policies let you control who can use Giphy GIFs, memes, stickers, and custom emojis in Teams.

To create a custom messaging policy, sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center and go to Messaging policies. Click Add Then enter a name for your new policy.

Scroll through the settings until you find the following options:

• Upload custom emojis: This lets you decide which users in your organization can create custom emojis. By default, all Microsoft Teams users can create emoticons, but you can turn this option off if you prefer.
• Delete custom emojis: You can also choose which users can delete custom emojis. The delete option is disabled by default for everyone except team admins, but you can change the setting here too to allow more people to delete the emoticons.
• Use Giphy in conversations: If you’re tired of chat channels being filled with animated GIFs, you can turn off the option to include Giphys in chat conversations. Scroll down a bit further and you can also set restrictions on which Giphys are available based on their “content rating.”
• Memes in conversations: For more professional settings, you can disable the Memes option for users entirely, or allow only some users to access it.
• Stickers in conversations: Again, you can disable stickers in chat conversations or allow only a handful of people to use them.

Remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely remove emoticons from Microsoft Teams. You can’t even disable the automatic text to emoji conversion feature. At least not yet. However, you can always Ctrl+Z above option or disable animated emoticons.

Additionally, as an administrator, you can deny your users access to a range of other expression features, from GIFs to custom emojis.

Hopefully Microsoft will pay attention to its users and introduce an option to disable emoticons in the future, but for now we have to deal with emojis whether we like them or not.

FAQ

Can you disable automatic emojis in Microsoft Teams?

Currently, there is no way for Microsoft Teams users or admins to turn off the Auto-Emoji feature. You can turn off animations for emojis as an individual user. Additionally, admins can prevent users from accessing GIFs, stickers, and memes in Teams by creating messaging policies for Teams.

How do I remove an emoji reaction in Teams?

If you accidentally send an emoji reaction to a message in Teams, you can hover over the emoji you want to replace or remove and simply click the reaction again to remove it or replace it with a different reaction.

How do you hide reactions in Microsoft Teams meetings?

Sign in to the Microsoft Teams Admin Center as an administrator and click Conferences followed by Meeting guidelines. Select the policy you want to edit and scroll to Fulfillment of requirements section. Then switch on the Reactions Setting to Off. You can turn it back on at any time. Click Save to confirm the changes.