Laundry care symbols typed in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Office-Watch.comLast updated: 8 January 2024

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Many different ways to type or insert laundry care symbols, which appear on clothing labels, into Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Laundry care symbols can be for laundry area signs or for fun like this t-shirt.

Or alternative symbols in a PowerPoint slide. All five symbols were black laundry care icons. As SVG graphics all five symbols were recolored in Office very easily.

Unlike many other common symbols, laundry care icons aren’t in the Unicode specification along with letters, numbers, currency, musical notes and all manner of other stuff.

There’s an ISO standard (if you’re keeping score, ISO 3758:2012 “Textiles — Care labelling code using symbols”) however the symbols are copyright in various countries. That’s probably why they’ve not been included into the Unicode standard.

To make things more confusing, laundry care symbols vary across the globe. The US, Canada, Europe and Japan all have different or overlapping symbol sets plus an International (GINTEX) standard for everyone else. Gintex has an exhaustive Technical Document if you’re interested in the details.

Coats.com has a good summary of the standards and differences.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll work with the general symbols without going into the regional specifics.

Image or Font

With most symbols of any kind, there’s a choice: as an image or a group of symbols contained in a font.

For occasional use, individual images are enough. Preferably SVG graphics but large JPG or GIF are fine.

Fonts are the better choice if you’re using the symbols regularly. The right font has all the symbols in one compact file and place ready to use.

Keep in mind that copyright can apply to laundry symbols.

SVG Laundry Care Symbols

SVG graphics are best because they can be resized and colored easily in Microsoft 365 or Office 2019/2021 for Windows or Mac.

Happily, Wikipedia has common laundry symbols in SVG format. For example the Laundry Symbol page.

Click on an image to open the download page. Select the download button on right. Then choose a download type. Make sure it’s an SVG format (only choose JPG or GIF if there’s no SVG available).

Add an SVG graphic to any Office 365/2019 document, worksheet or presentation from Insert | Picture.

Edit options for SVG Icons in Office 365/2019

Make simple changes to SVG graphics

Non-SVG laundry symbols

For other versions of Office, choose a JPG, PNG or GIF version instead. The same Wikipedia page has PNG available by right-clicking on the image then choosing ‘Save image as …’ or ‘Copy Image’. The exact options depend on your browser.