One More Place for Emoji

I discovered recently that you can put an emoji in an Auto Number field!

If you're working on that new custom object and you want its auto-named records to stand out, an emoji as the identifier is more fun than CustObj-1, CustObj-2... [Perhaps this is finally my chance to use that pirate flag 🏴‍☠️, if only I can figure out what custom object it should go with.]

Since emoji are nothing but text characters, I don't think I even need to give you instructions. You just add the emoji of your choice into the setup page of your custom object:

Now your new records all have a fun and colorful separator!

Why would I do this?

Because it's fun and colorful!

If you need more convincing than that, this isn't for you.

What are the risks?

I can see two reasons I'm not likely to actually use this any time soon.

Risk of Unintended Consequences

To be honest, I don't know if there could be unintended negative consequences to using emoji in a Name field. I can think of possibilities, though:

1. Storage: I know that emoji often take extra storage compared to a single character. But at the same time, I know this is also true of letters with diacritics, such as ñ, é, and the like so I'm not super worried here. But it seems within the realm of possibility that the extra storage could result in an error at some obscure point.

2. Output Confusion: Depending on where that Name field is going to be used, the emoji might not be handled gracefully. I've seen copy/paste into some applications fail to paste the emoji. Similarly, a report export might not work right. You'll want to test and keep an eye out.

Challenge in Referring to Records

This is really the one that's giving me pause.

I frequently find myself having to either verbally or in writing reference one or more records of an auto-numbered object. It's annoying enough to type an email about, for examples, Respite-001367 and Respite-001380. If I want to be accurate (and consistent) I have to:

1. Remember if there are spaces around the hyphens or not.

2. Keep the leading zeros in mind, either typing/speaking or omitting them consistently.

That's already some level of cognitive burden. But at least I can type those names without lifting my hands from the keyboard or moving my eyes from the screen. But if I had to include emoji in the names, it could be a lot of clicks. And some emoji aren't necessarily that convenient to add when you're speaking the record name either.

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

If you have a use case where this will give your colleagues a smile and the risks are low, go for it! We should all have more joy in our lives. I'm not recommending this for every object or every org.

I do, however, hope I start to see it in demos and presentations!