There’s more possible with the humble ! exclamation mark / point in Microsoft Word or Office. At least five different ! available and that’s before changing color, size and other text effect options.
We’ll show you ways to insert FIVE different exclamation marks into Office, as characters, icons, symbols and several emoji with infinite variations possible on those five base symbols.
We’re not including the inverted or Spanish exclamation mark ¡ among them.
Exclamation Mark
Let’s start with the obvious exclamation mark but with options you may not have thought about.
ASCII: 33
Unicode: 0021 (hex) 033 (decimal)
Not that you’d often need the number codes because ! is a standard character available directly on most, if not all, keyboards.
As you can see, exclamation is only the second character in the ASCII list, just after the space and well before the numbers and letters.
! Font variations
There are all sorts of exclamation marks; fat, skinny, tall. short. Round ends, square ends, pointy ends. Square, round, oval dots.
Here’s a quick selection; same exclamation mark, same size and color, only the font is different.
Quite a selection and most of them are in-built Windows or Office fonts.
You’d normally use the same font as surrounding text. But for signs and other stand-alone purposes, the choice of exclamation is more important. For example, this PowerPoint slide.
Transform ! with outline, shadow and other text effects.
Like any other character, Word can transform it with different colors, outline, shadow, glow or reflection effects.
In Word all those options and many more are on the Home tab | Font | Text Effects and Typography.
Icon !
There is more than one exclamation mark hiding in Word. Microsoft 365/Office 2021/2019 has Insert | Icons which includes another exclamation mark under Signs and symbols.
As an icon, there are many more formatting options available.
MAKE SIMPLE CHANGES TO SVG GRAPHICS
EDIT OPTIONS FOR SVG ICONS IN OFFICE 365/2019
Four ! Exclamation Emoji
If that isn’t enough, there are two exclamation ! emoji plus a double-exclamation and a combined question mark/exclamation.
Heavy Exclamation Emoji
Original (left), Text Effect variations (right)
It’s available in Office with any emoji-capable font like Segoe UI Emoji.
In Word, get the Heavy Exclamation Mark emoji from Insert | Symbol, select a font with emoji symbols then type 2757 Unicode (hex) in the box.
Or type the Unicode value 2757 then Alt + X (see the old Alt + X trick).
You can change the color and look of the emoji symbol, just like any other Word character, see above.
Heart Exclamation Emoji
Another ‘exclamation’ emoji is ‘Heavy Heart Exclamation’.
Unicode: 2763 (Hex) in Word 2763 then Alt + X.
Original (left), Text Effect variations (right)
Double Exclamation Emoji
There’s a double exclamation emoji which is two exclamation points as a single character block. They are closer together than two of the single exclamation emoji.
Unicode: 203C (Hex) in Word 203C then Alt + X.
Original (left), Text Effect variations (right)
Exclamation Question Mark
Finally, there’s an exclamation and question mark emoji which is an alternative to the overlaid ‽ Interrobang
Unicode: 2049 (Hex) in Word 2049 then Alt + X.
Original (left), Text Effect variations (right)
Is it Exclamation Mark or Exclamation Point?
You might have noticed that this article has both “exclamation mark” and “exclamation point“. Both are correct usage, depending on where you learned English.
Exclamation Point is mostly US American English
Exclamation Mark is British English and other variants in the UK’s former colonies.
Phillip Adams on the wonderful Late Night Live has an interesting talk about the history, use and debate about the exclamation mark.
Upside-down or Spanish Exclamation mark in Word
Upside-down or Spanish Question mark in Word
