Emojis are fun in a message and a problem in a spreadsheet. They throw off sorting, break exports to other systems, and clutter any text you plan to analyze.
Stripping them sounds simple. Then you learn how emojis are actually stored, and it stops being simple.
The Old Way (REGEXREPLACE)
The usual answer is a REGEXREPLACE that deletes anything outside the normal character range.
=REGEXREPLACE(A2, "[\x{1F000}-\x{1FAFF}\x{2600}-\x{27BF}\x{2190}-\x{21FF}]", "")Emojis are scattered across many Unicode blocks, and new ones ship every year. So you keep adding ranges. Skin-tone modifiers, flags, and combined sequences each live somewhere different, and each one you forget leaves a stray glyph behind.
Worse, a range that is too greedy will eat accented letters or currency symbols you wanted to keep. Now you are debugging Unicode instead of cleaning data.
The FITS Way (Just Ask)
With FITS, you say what you want gone. The AI knows what an emoji is, so you skip the codepoint archaeology.
=FITS("Remove all emojis from this text, keep everything else: " & A2)It leaves accented letters, punctuation, and symbols in place, because it understands the difference. No range tables, and no re-editing the formula when a new emoji set drops next year.
When to Use Each
If you only need to strip a couple of known emojis, a plain SUBSTITUTE works. Reach for =FITS() when the emoji set is unpredictable, when you must protect accented text, or when this is one step in a wider cleanup. Emojis usually ride in alongside other mess, so pair it with trimming extra spaces, removing special characters, or a full data normalize pass. Cleanup is one job on a long list. Read the full guide to automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for.
Stop Memorizing Unicode Ranges
FITS puts plain-English AI formulas inside Google Sheets. Describe what to strip. Get clean text back. Free tier included.