A Fresh Way to Customize Labels in Microsoft Dynamics 365

One of the greatest advantages of Dynamics 365 is the number of ways you can tailor it to fit your business needs. Likely, you’re already creating custom labels to capture information unique to your company’s business processes, however there’s one clever way you can customize labels that you may not have considered: emojis.

Adding emojis to labels is relatively simple process that essentially involves copying and pasting the desired emoji into your configuration. You can add them to a variety of places within your D365 environment including fields, forms, tabs and charts.

Out of the box, the only way to indicate that a field is important, but not required, in Dynamics 365 is by making it “business recommended”. This puts a very small blue cross symbol next to the field name, but it has very limited applications no other options for variation.

Using emojis allows your team to visually highlight important fields or even show how fields are related to each other.

Warning Symbols for Important Fields

There are always a few fields in a CRM environment that have a greater impact than others. Consider adding a warning symbol to indicate when updating a field would trigger an important action. The screenshot below shows a situation where a user is being reminded that updating the payment terms on the account will result in the customer receiving a notification. The emoji immediately draws the eye and makes the warning much more effective.

Star Rating Systems for Customer Feedback

Another interesting way you can use emojis is to visually display values in an option set, such as a customer star rating.

Adding emojis to custom labels in D365 is simple and straight forward.

1. Find an emoji that you would like to use and copy it to your clipboard.
2. Paste the emoji into the label of the option set value, field name, etc.
3. Save your changes.
4. Publish your customizations.

One consideration when adding emojis to an option set is how it will impact the resulting data. Does it render clearly in Excel or Power BI? While emojis render clearly within the Dynamics 365 user interface, you will want to ensure it is also translatable to any reporting and consider if the data is integrated to any other systems such as a form on your website or survey data. It’s also worth taking a moment to think about how you are naming the labels to ensure they are easily searchable. You want to be able to quickly pull data without needing to copy and paste an emoji.

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Altriva Solutions is an award-winning business technology consulting firm. Founded on CRM and Microsoft technologies, they help companies achieve their business objectives through smart, integrated, customer-centric solutions. Their consultants take the time to understand each client’s unique processes and priorities so that they can provide not only advanced technical knowledge of Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure, but also strategic business recommendations honed over hundreds of projects and nearly two decades in the industry. Learn More