How to embed fonts in PowerPoint
Embedding fonts is good practice when you use custom fonts in your presentations AND you want to ensure a consistent visual experience. Why? Because if someone doesn't have your custom font available, PowerPoint will use a different font in its place, and this can cause visual changes to your presentation layout. 😞
First, we’ll share some alternative approaches to maintaining visual consistency, before showing you how to embed fonts if you definitely need to use custom fonts.
Safe fonts in PowerPoint
For a long time the best advice to ensure you didn’t have problems with visual changes due to missing fonts, was to aim to use only ‘safe fonts’. Various lists were maintained of fonts that should always be available on both Windows and Mac by default. Julie Terberg created this list of safe fonts for PowerPoint a while back, which is still accurate. It’s no longer actively maintained, because Microsoft has provided a more flexible option now in the form of cloud fonts.
Cloud fonts in PowerPoint
Microsoft introduced Cloud Fonts in 2019, which are available to anyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription. The available fonts have massively expanded since they were first launched, and now you have hundreds of great typeface options. The only requirement is that people opening your presentation will need to have an Internet connection.
With cloud fonts, if anyone is missing a font it is automatically downloaded the first time the presentation is opened. There are hundreds of great fonts available and you just need an internet connection on the computer viewing - it will download the fonts required automatically.
A full list of cloud fonts is available on the link above, but if you want to dive in and start using them - just look for a cloud + arrow symbol next to font names in the font list in PowerPoint. Any of these fonts can be used without embedding, and they will be automatically downloaded for anyone viewing your presentation later.
Embed custom fonts in PowerPoint
If you need to use custom fonts and you want to make sure your presentation looks correct on other computers, then you will need to embed the fonts in your file.
Embedding the font means including a copy of it within your PowerPoint file so that other people who open it can still use the font, even if they don’t have it installed locally. This will increase the file size of your presentation but ensures that any recipient can open it on their computer and see/edit it as you intended.
How to embed fonts in PowerPoint Windows
1. Click the File tab in the ribbon and then select Options.
2. In the Options dialog, select Save.
3. At the bottom of the right panel, select the Embed fonts in the file check box.
4. Choose either Embed only the characters used in the presentation (Subset) or Embed all characters. If you choose to Subset then users without the font may not be able to properly edit the text as they don’t have the full font embedded.
Note: PowerPoint will not embed common system fonts like Arial by default to avoid increasing file size by including a font which is almost universally available.
How to embed fonts in PowerPoint Mac
1. Click PowerPoint in the menu bar and select Preferences (or alternatively hold ⌘ + ,).
2. Click Save, in the middle-left, under Output and Sharing.
3. Under the Font Embedding heading, check Embed fonts in the file.
Some additional things to consider before embedding fonts:
Embedding fonts will ensure your file looks the same when it is viewed or edited by others but it will also make your presentation or document larger, in some cases by a lot!
Check how common your fonts are. If it is likely that the people you share your presentation/document with already have the fonts on their system then it is probably not worth increasing your file size by embedding them.
If you don’t embed fonts and someone opens the presentation without having the font, PowerPoint will just automatically select a similar font to display the text, so it will look different for them. However, it will not change which font is referenced, so they will be able to edit the file and send it back. When you open it back on your computer with the font available it will display correctly including the new edits.
Extra font powers on Windows
If you are on Windows, then our PowerPoint add-in Slidewise, gives you some additional superpowers that can be really helpful if you need better control over embedding fonts or if you regularly deal with presentations with lots of fonts.
Slidewise shows you a list of all fonts used in a presentation and lets you jump to them in PowerPoint. Fonts can lurk in surprising places, so it’s really helpful to be able to see exactly which fonts are used in your deck. It also shows if fonts are embedded, the size of individual fonts, and it lets you easily embed, subset or remove them.
This can be really helpful because it’s very easy when embedding fonts to accidentally include fonts you didn’t intend to, which can make your file extra large unnecessarily. For more detail, watch our video on changing font embedding in PowerPoint with Slidewise.
Slidewise also lets you quickly remove individual fonts, which we’ve written about in this blog post on replacing fonts in PowerPoint.
Slidewise comes with a free 30-day trial of all the features, and some features - including the font list - remain 100% free forever.