The Unwanted Graphic Substitutions
Google Docs includes a comprehensive “Substitutions” engine that automatically converts specific keystrokes into special characters as you type. One of the most noticeable—and sometimes annoying—aspects of this engine is its handling of emoticons. By default, if you type standard ASCII smiley faces like :) or :(, Google Docs will instantly intercept those keystrokes and automatically convert them into colorful, graphical emoji characters (like 🙂 or ☹️).
While this is a fun feature when writing casual notes to friends, it is wildly inappropriate for professional or technical writing. If you are drafting a serious corporate memo, an academic paper, or writing code snippets where a colon followed by a parenthesis has a specific syntactical meaning, having your text suddenly transform into a bright yellow cartoon face is incredibly disruptive. If you want a typed colon and parenthesis to remain exactly as you typed them—as plain text characters—you must turn off this specific automatic substitution.
How to Stop Automatic Emoji Conversion
You can prevent Docs from converting text emoticons into graphical emojis via the Preferences menu.
- Open your document in Google Docs.
- Look at the top toolbar and click on the Tools menu.
- Select Preferences from the dropdown menu.
- In the Preferences window, click on the Substitutions tab at the top.
- You will see a long list of automatic replacements. You can either scroll down and find the specific entries for
:),:(, etc., and uncheck them individually… - …Or, for a cleaner approach, locate the master checkbox at the very top of the list labelled Automatic substitution and uncheck it entirely. (This will also stop Docs from automatically creating copyright symbols
(c)and fractions1/2). - Click the blue OK button to save your changes.
From now on, typing :) will result in exactly those two plain text characters, preserving the professional formatting of your document.