Font Types and Sizes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

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:

1. Create a new presentation and type some text in the placeholder, and select it, as shown in Figure 1, below.
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   Figure 1: Text on the slide
2. Now, navigate to the Home tab of the Ribbon and locate the Font group, as highlighted in red within Figure 2, below.
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   Figure 2: Font group within the Home tab of the Ribbon
3. Within the Font group, click the downward pointing arrow located next to Font option, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 3, below. Doing so brings up the Font drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 3.
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   Figure 3: Font drop-down gallery
5. 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, as shown highlighted in green within Figure 3, above, to scroll the font drop-down gallery.

4. 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, as shown in Figure 4. Click on any variation such as Medium to apply it to the selected text. These variations will differ from typeface to typeface.
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   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.

6. Alternatively, you can directly type the name of the font within the Font box, as shown in Figure 5, below. 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, as shown in Figure 5, press the Enter key to apply the font type for selected text.
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   Figure 5: Type font name within Font box
5. 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.
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   Figure 6: Font Size drop-down gallery
6. 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, below, you can see font size 60 being selected. Also you can directly type in the font size value within the Font Size box.
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   Figure 7: Font Size being changed
8. Alternatively, you can also use the Increase Font Size and Decrease Font Size buttons, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 7, below, to change the font size of selected text.
7. In Figure 8, below, you can see the changed font type and size of the selected text. Compare Figures 1 and 8.
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   Figure 8: Text with changed font type and size
8. Save your presentation often.