The Need to Make Teams Chat Section Names into Visual Anchors

Still amazed by the news that Teams reactions to chat and channel conversations support up to 20 emojis (apparently to convey nuanced responses), the news delivered in MC1166877 (6 October 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 503300) that Teams will support emojis in section names for chat and channels quite blew my mind.

Microsoft says that they’re introducing the feature to allow “users to personalize and visually organize their workspace more expressively, aligning with familiar experiences from other collaboration platforms like Slack.” In other words, because Slack plasters emojis around its interface, Teams must follow. In this case, the desktop and browser clients get the feature first followed by mobile clients, with deployment scheduled to targeted release tenants in early November 2025. If all goes well (and what can go wrong with an emoji?), general availability will follow in late November 2025 to all commercial and education tenants. Think of it as a thanksgiving present.

Chat and Channel Sections

Teams introduced sections as part of the new Chat and Channels experience in late 2024. Sections allow users to organize chats and channels into convenient groupings that make sense to the user, For example, I have a section for chats with the individual members of the Office 365 for IT Pros author team. I have another session for chats with people who work at Microsoft, and I use another section for the channels that I think most important in terms of checking for new messages daily, and so on.

Until now, section names are confined to simple text. When the update lands in your tenant, you’ll be able to enliven the section names with emojis. You can create a new section or rename existing sections and insert as many emojis as you like up to the 50-character limit for a section name (Figure 1).

To access the set of available emojis, use the Windows icon and . (period sign) combination. I believe this is the method to insert emojis with MacOS.

Figure 2 shows the kind of “visual anchors” that emojis create for sections. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not sure that the emojis add much to my ability to navigate. Maybe the new section names will grow on me.

No Custom Emojis

Disappointingly, Teams doesn’t support custom emojis for section names. When I wrote about custom emojis last year, I created several new emojis, including a rather good Mickey Mouse. However, it seems like the set of emojis revealed for picking is limited to emojis supported by the operating system rather than Teams emojis.

No Administrator Control Over Teams Chat Section Names

I know that some tenant administrators will see emojis in section names as a mere frippery, something that Microsoft is wasting time on instead of fixing other problems, so let me note that there’s no control over allowing emojis to be used. Adding emojis to sections is base functionality that cannot be switched off, so the only thing a tenant can do is keep their users in a state of blissful ignorance and hope that no one ever finds out what they can do to create “visual anchors” to navigate through Teams chats and channel conversations.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive insights updated monthly into what happens within Microsoft 365, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.