Picking a font in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint can be confusing, especially with the existing long, long menus. Now, Microsoft 365 offers a new, easier font picker in two web apps. The new font menu has better search and simple organization, finding the right style for your document or presentation is faster and clearer than ever.
The web versions of Word and PowerPoint have a much better font picker than the desktop apps. Here’s what’s available online.
Porting this font menu to the Microsoft 365 or Office apps for Windows and Mac can’t come soon enough. The current font menu hasn’t changed much in years despite Microsoft adding more and more fonts to the default collection. There are more than 700 fonts, including cloud fonts available in Microsoft 365 for Windows!
Before digging into what’s possible with the new font menu, I’ll start with the feature I really like and not just because it’s taken years for Microsoft to act on the customer feedback.
Search by name
Find a font by name or just part of a name. It works just like the autocomplete search available in modern Excel.
The current desktop app font menu only lets you type in a name. Just start typing and the matching font names will appear. For example, type “luc” will show all the Lucida family fonts.
The search can be for any part of a name, for example searching for ‘Sans’ finds all the fonts that include that name
Even part names will do, like this search for ‘rit’ which finds any font with those three letters in the name.
Three Font groups
The new list has three font groupings plus a large view of available fonts.
Most Recently Used
Most Recently Used (MRU) has the current Heading and Body (Normal style) fonts plus some others.
The list seems to be prepopulated with common fonts like Times New Roman, Calibri Light and Calibri.
As other fonts are used in the document, they should be added to this list.
However, in our testing this wasn’t reliable. Some fonts applied to a document did not appear on the Most Recently Used list.
Pinned Fonts
A better option is the Pinned Fonts group which each customer can control. It’s only available for Microsoft 365 customers.
The Pinned Font list works (almost) as you’d expect. Pin a font to the list by clicking the outline pin icon to the left of a font name.
Unpin by clicking the black pin on the left.
Strangely, there’s no ‘pin’ option next to Most Recently Used font. A common situation is choosing a font, it appears in the MRU list then the customer decides they want to Pin it for future use. Instead, they have to find the font again in the larger “Office fonts” list.
Is that a strange developer choice or a bug?
The Pinned Fonts list is also pre-populated but you can change it to suit you.
Office Fonts – aka All Fonts
The All fonts list is called “Office Fonts” and is a long, long menu.
Explore Fonts
Explore Fonts is a larger window to choose a font with bigger sample text. The same ‘search as you type’ is available as well as pinning a font to the main font menu using the top-right icon.
Shift + Enter is supposed to pin/unpin a font though we could not get the shortcut to work.
Font options
The fly out menu for each typeface shows the fonts (Normal, Bold. Italic etc.) available.
About this font
At the bottom of the font style list is ‘About this font’
Which opens a side-pane with details of the font, taken from the Microsoft web site.
Microsoft 365 extras
If you’re logged in as a Microsoft 365 customer, the font menu has some extras:
- Microsoft 365 users can access 900 fonts/260 font families compared to just 82 fonts for free Microsoft accounts.
- More ‘premium’ fonts
- Pinning fonts
- Information icon for embedded/compatibility fonts.
- Warning icons for missing fonts
What’s missing
The main omission is “Fonts in this document”. Just like the old font menu, there’s an assumption that the same fonts are wanted for all documents but that’s not always the case. Even in a business setting, some documents will be reports or memos but others can be more decorative like a brochure.
To make font selection easier and more consistent, a group of fonts already used in that document would be extremely useful.
