Choosing Fonts for Powerpoint and Keynote Presentations

To prevent a common problem associated with presentation development in Keynote or Powerpoint, it helps to limit your font usage to the most commonly used fonts in the PC or Macintosh universe.

Exporting a deck to another computer will often result in changes to the way your slides look. These changes are often harmless or can be easily fixed, but if the second computer lacks one or more of the fonts used in building the presentation, it will use other fonts in their place, which can yield unpredictable results. The replacement font can wreak havoc on text boxes and especially tables and shapes that contain text.

To remedy this, the developer will either have to change the fonts used in the original file to match those already installed on the second computer, or download and install the missing font or fonts on the second computer. The first option can take a lot of work; the second can be time-consuming.

To make matters worse, there could always be a need to present the final deck from a third computer that you won’t have access to until the day the presentation is to be delivered.

Smart presentation developers avoid these by making sure the fonts they wish to use are already installed on the presenter’s system. If this isn’t possible, it’s best to limit font choices to those installed on 95% or more of PCs and Macs worldwide.

Windows: Microsoft Sans Serif, Verdana, Tahoma, Courier New, Arial, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans MS, Lucida Console, Arial Black, Impact, Georgia, Times New Roman, Lucida Sans Unicode, Palatino Linotype, Franklin Gothic Medium, and Sylfaen.

Macintosh: Helvetica, Monaco, Courier, Geneva, Lucida Grande, Arial, and Verdana.

More information is available at CodeStyle.

[Gary Reichardt]