One of the easiest ways to improve PowerPoint designs is by playing around with typography. By simply changing up fonts, you can instantly create unique slides. You don’t have to stick with using standard fonts, either. If you really want to dabble in typography, there are plenty of custom fonts to be found online.
How to Add Fonts: PowerPoint automatically displays all of the fonts that you have downloaded to your computer. Therefore, you have to. Go to Google Fonts, then select whichever font you want by clicking the “ + ” button. Open the tab that appears at the. The Regular style will automatically be. Add Slide Numbers to a PowerPoint Presentation. To add slide numbers, open a PowerPoint presentation with several slides added and then click the “Insert” tab. From here, you’ll need to select the “Header & Footer” button in the “Text” section. This will bring up the “Header and Footer” options box.
Despite its many advantages, custom fonts can complicate your PowerPoint process. You will need to install the new fonts to your computer. You also have to make sure that PowerPoint doesn’t substitute your custom fonts with a standard one when it’s time to share the deck with others. Here’s a step-by-step guide in making sure the process is as smooth and easy for you.
Choose 1 to 2 fonts from any of the following sources. Make sure you use the same fonts throughout your presentation. For more tips on choosing and combining different fonts, check out the infographic from yesterday’s post.
The fonts in these sites are OpenType fonts (OTF) and TrueType fonts (TTF). Download your choices following instructions provided in the sites. They will usually come in a ZIP archive, so make sure you have a software like WinRAR to extract the files you need.
Once extracted, the fonts will need to be installed on your computer. Double click the TrueType or OpenType font file and click Install.
Head to PowerPoint and check if you can access the new fonts. If you can, you’re ready to experiment with typography. Work as you usually would and build your PowerPoint deck. Once you’re done, you’ll need to take one extra step to ensure your fonts will look the same in other computers. There are 2 different techniques to save custom fonts in PowerPoint. You can choose to embed fonts, or turn your text into pictures.
PowerPoint allows you to embed non-standard fonts as long as they are TTF or OTF files. All you have to do is head to File and choose Options. There, click Save and check the box for “Embed fonts in this file“.
Keep in mind that this technique will likely bloat your file size, so it’s best if you choose “Embed only the characters used in the presentation“.
You can also save text as a picture instead. Simply right click on the text placeholder and choose Save as Picture.
You can then replace the text with the picture afterwards. This will take a lot more time, but it’s a great technique if your chosen font is neither a TTF nor OTF file. It’s also the best way to ensure that your text will look the same way on any device.
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When you use a unique font that is not a standard Windows or Office font, you risk suffering with the possible effects of font substitution occurring when your file is opened on another system. When font substitution takes place, the look of your presentation can change considerably. Parts of the text can become misaligned, text wrapping points may change, and special characters can turn into meaningless rectangles. To prevent font substitution from happening, you can try embedding the fonts to make sure the document looks the same on other computers. As a result, you minimize the risk of the fonts, layout, and styling of the presentation changing. Without using the embed feature, you may feel your only choice is to rely on sharing your file in only in pdf format because pdfs allow you lock down the look of the document. But pdfs suffer from the disadvantage of not allowing full editing rights and not being able to play your animations.
To turn on embedding you need to activate that option. Keep in mind that the file size will increase typically by several megabytes for each font embedded.
No, please be aware of 2 very important features of a font that can limit your ability to embed it.
Font designers often will restrict the ability of a font to be embedded. This prevents unlicensed use of the font. Generally, if the font is purchased at a higher price point, the ability to have PowerPoint embeddability is unlocked.
Fonts can be purchased with 1 of 4 levels of embeddability:
The levels of Editable and Installable allow the font characters to be embedded in PowerPoint.
To check what rights you have to a font: go to Control Panel in Windows and click Fonts. Clicking on the font shows the Font embeddability.
In the picture above, the Mickey Ears Regular font is shown as being Installable Therefore, this font can be embedded in PowerPoint and Word.
For more information, check out Microsoft’s Font Redistribution FAQ document.
Unfortunately, you cannot tell directly from within PowerPoint. Be aware that just looking at the font named in the Font box does not help, because it will always show the name of the original font even if the system has no access to that font. The only way to way to investigate if the embedding truly worked is to use a workaround.
The only way to way to investigate if the embedding truly worked is by using a workaround through exporting the presentation as a pdf. For the workaround, you should launch your PowerPoint presentation from a computer that does not have the font(s) installed and save it as a pdf. Then compare the fonts listed in the pdf by Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe Acrobat to those listed in PowerPoint.
The complete steps to do the workaround are:
Below is an example showing the two listing of fonts side by side. . By comparing the lists, you can see the Proxima Nova font is substituted in PowerPoint since it is not listed in the Adobe pdf list of fonts.
Unfortunately, with PowerPoint, you cannot control the font substitution. The algorithm that PowerPoint uses in selecting fonts to substitute is not completely known. Even with two systems that are completely identical and with both not possessing the original font, PowerPoint will not necessarily choose the same font on the two different systems.
On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click on the drop down menu for Replace and select Replace Fonts.
In the Replace Font window, work with each font listed in the Replace box one at a time. If the font needs to be replaced with a more common font, select the replacement font in the With box and click on Replace.
The conversion will replace the fonts on:
Safe fonts are those that are generally installed with either the Operating System or with the install of Microsoft Office.
These resource pages at Indezine.com and at Ampsoft.net list the fonts installed with the various versions of Microsoft Office. If you utilize one of the fonts that is predominantly used across the various versions of Office, you can be relatively sure that your presentation will not suffer any unintended consequences of font substitution taking place on other computers.
No, there are some important differences. Please read my other post on Word font embedding FAQs to discover how there are more direct tools to figure out Font Substitution in Word.