The default appearance of your text in PowerPoint depends upon its font type and size. By default, these choices are based on the
Theme which is applied to your presentation. So if you use PowerPoint's default
Office Theme, then anything you type into a text object may be in the Calibri typeface. Still, you can easily
change the Theme Fonts set altogether for your presentation, and all
text instances will change to the default typefaces of the new Theme or Theme Fonts set. Also, you can override
these defaults and choose a typeface that is different -- or even a different font size. In this tutorial, we use the terms typeface and font type
interchangeably - let us now explore how you can choose different font types and change the font size of the selected text on the slide:
- Create a new presentation and type some text in the
placeholder, and select it as shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1: Text on the slide
- Now, navigate to the Home tab of the
Ribbon and
locate the Font group, as highlighted in red within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Font group within the Home tab of the Ribbon
- Within the Font group, click the downward pointing arrow located next to Font option, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 3. This brings up the Font drop-down gallery,
as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Font drop-down gallery
-
As marked in Figure 3, the Font drop-down gallery is divided into three sections:
- A. Font Collections: Includes fonts grouped into various categories like Fun, Classic etc. We
explain this option further in our Font Collections tutorial.
- B. Theme Fonts: Displays the active font types of your
presentation.
- C. All Fonts: Displays all fonts installed on the system. If you want to explore more fonts, just place your cursor on the
down-arrow (highlighted in green within Figure 3, above) to scroll the font drop-down gallery.
- To change the font type from the default Theme Fonts to some other font, first select the text.
Thereafter open the Font drop-down gallery shown in Figure 3, scroll down and choose any font type from
within the All Fonts section. Figure 4 below shows a different font type, Futura being selected. Futura, as a typeface provides variations in a sub-gallery (see Figure 4 again).
Click on any variation such as Medium to apply it to the selected
text. These variations will differ from typeface to typeface.
Figure 4: Medium variation of Futura font type being selected
Note: All typefaces don't provide variations, or even the same variations as Futura provides. Typefaces that
have a small triangle placed next to them indicate these variations.
-
Alternatively, you can directly type the name of the font within the Font box, as shown in Figure 5. Start typing
the first few alphabets of the font you want to use -- for example, when we typed Fut, we could locate Futura. Once the font name is active (see Figure 5), press the Enter key to apply the font type for selected text.
Figure 5: Type font name within Font box
- With the text still selected, navigate to the Home tab of the
Ribbon and within the Font group click the downward
pointing arrow located next to Font Size option, as shown highlighted in red within
Figure 6. This brings up the Font Size drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Font Size drop-down gallery
- Note that the font size with a tick mark in front of it is the size of the currently selected text. Now, scroll down the
Font Size gallery and select another font size. In Figure 7 you can see font size 60 being selected. Also you can
directly type in the font size value within the Font Size box.
Figure 7: Font Size being changed
-
Alternatively, you can also use the Increase Font Size and Decrease Font Size buttons, highlighted in
red within Figure 7 to change the font size of selected text.
- In Figure 8 you can see the changed font type and size of the selected text.
Compare Figures 1 and 8.
Figure 8: Text with changed font type and size
- Save your presentation often.
