3 ways unwanted fonts get into your PowerPoint presentations
Unwanted fonts in presentations can cause visual issues, where some text is rendered incorrectly, or they can cause more overt problems, such as warnings when opening or saving your file.
Warnings might trigger when you try and save the file like this:
Or you may see them when opening a file like this:
Either way, it can be annoying. If you cannot find where the font is actually used and/or you don’t even want that font, fixing it can be a massive productivity drain.
While building Slidewise we investigated hundreds of PowerPoint files to make sure the font list and replacement features worked correctly. We found fonts that triggered warnings hiding in some surprising places. The most common places we found:
Default List Styles
Default Shape Styles
Asian or complex script fonts
We’ll tell you more about each of these, how to spot them and what to do about them below.
Default List Styles
Default list styles are a set of instructions attached to a text box, which tell PowerPoint the default formatting to use if a bulleted list is added. Unfortunately, even if your text box doesn’t contain a bulleted list, the default list styles can still cause font warnings to happen.
How does it happen?
When you duplicate a content placeholder, PowerPoint creates a new text box that includes a copy of the current List Styles (all 9 levels) from the Layout at that point in time. Because it is no longer a placeholder, these styles are now orphaned from the master so they won’t update if you later change the styles in your Layouts. They also get copied around with this new text box.
We’d recommend where possible to avoid duplicating placeholders for this reason, and instead create a new text box and copy the content into it.
How can you spot if you have this problem?
It’s actually very hard to see if you have this problem just using PowerPoint because the only way to see the default formatting is to create a list with all 9 levels to see what formatting gets applied. To do this click on the Bullets button (green outline) in the Ribbon . Then create 9 lines of text in your shape. Then use the Increase List Levels button (orange outline) to indent each successive line by one level until you have all 9 levels.
Obviously, in a standard presentation where you have a lot of shapes, it’s not practical to go through shape-by-shape doing this.
Fortunately, Slidewise can help you with this. You can jump to any places where the unwanted font is used, and then check the details in the Inspector.
As well as the font names it also indicates how those fonts are being used. In the example below you can see that both Calibri and .AppleSystemUIFont are being used for bullets (bu). If you don’t have a bulleted list in the selected text box then chances are you seeing default list styles at work.
We plan to add support for finding default list styles and removing them in a future release.
How can you fix this?
It isn’t possible to edit this style information using the PowerPoint UI. So to fix this you need to copy the content out of your existing text box, create a new text box and paste the content in. This will give you a text box that only has the directly specified formatting, rather than the default list styles. After copying to a new text box you can see in Slidewise we’re down to just one font now - much better. 😊
If there are lots of font instances, you can always use Slidewise to replace all the fonts with a more suitable font.
Default Shape Styles
If you right-click on a shape or text box and use the Set as Default Shape, or Set as Default Text Box options, PowerPoint will write all possible properties including fonts, to a set of defaults that it will use for any new shapes or text boxes you create.
So if you use this option when you have a font that you later need to avoid using then it will keep coming back to haunt you.
How can you fix this?
To work around this you can set up a new shape or text box that does not have the font included and use the set as default option to replace the old defaults. Existing shapes or text boxes will not automatically change to the new defaults. For these, you can use Slidewise to replace all the fonts in one go.
Asian or complex script fonts
If you choose to use a font that can be used for either Latin or complex script, it will be added to BOTH places (green outlines). Which is fine unless you later change it to a font that doesn’t handle Asian or complex scripts, in which case the Latin will change, leaving the old font still specified for complex scripts.
This is what happens if you set a shape to use Aharoni for example:
If you then change the font in your text box to use Arial Nova (orange outline), it leaves the complex scripts font unchanged.
How can you spot if you have this problem?
Naturally, Slidewise again can help. On a shape-by-shape basis it not only lists ALL of the fonts used in the shape, it also tells you where the font is used. “bu” for bullets. “ea” for East Asian font, “cs” for Complex Scripts font - you can see in this example Calibri Light is used for both ea and cs.
How can you fix this?
The font dropdown in PowerPoint only shows you the main font used in a shape, or the font used for the selected part of the text. To see and edit the fonts specified to be used for Latin, Asian and Complex scripts, you need to select a shape and then click the More button (orange outline) in the bottom right corner of the Font section on the Ribbon. This opens the detailed Font dialog above that shows you which fonts are specified for each type of text.
You can change them on a shape-by-shape basis in PowerPoint, or you can use Slidewise to replace all the fonts in one go.
These were the 3 most common causes we found for rogue fonts turning up in presentations. If you have any other examples, we’d love to hear them — just reply in the comments below.
You may not necessarily be able to avoid these things happening, but now you can at least figure out why an unwanted font might be hanging around and how to get rid of them. We also plan to expand what Slidewise can do with fonts in the future, to make it even easier for you to quickly eliminate any fonts you don’t want.