Best fonts for presentations: what to pick, what size, and how to keep them intact

No font is best on its own. A good presentation font passes four tests:

• Readable at size and distance. Look for open letter shapes and a clear difference between look-alike characters such as a capital I, a lowercase l and the digit 1.
• Has the weights you need. At least regular and bold, so you can build hierarchy without a second font.
• Has the characters you need. Type a test line with accented letters, ß, the € sign, typographic quotation marks and a column of numbers.
• Is available where the deck is opened. Installed, embedded or a cloud font, as explained below.

Microsoft's accessibility guidance for PowerPoint asks for sans serif fonts to reduce the reading load and names Arial and Calibri as familiar examples. Microsoft also says on its page about the new Office theme that Aptos is the default font across Office.

The first two rows rest on Microsoft's own pages. The last three are editorial advice, not Microsoft rules. Avoid script and decorative fonts for anything people have to read, because they cost reading speed exactly where the deck needs it.

Two: one for headings and one for body text. The 3 font rule is a rule of thumb from design practice, not a Microsoft rule, and it caps a deck at three fonts. A work deck rarely needs the third. PowerPoint's own theme has two font slots, because the Create New Theme Fonts dialog asks for a heading font and a body font.

Build hierarchy with size, weight and color instead of more fonts. A single family also works: use its regular and bold weights, or pair a display cut with the text cut, as with Aptos Display and Aptos, both on Microsoft's cloud fonts list. If you do pair two families, pair by contrast. Two sans serif fonts that look almost alike read as a mistake, while a serif heading over a sans serif body, or one family in two weights, reads as a decision. The glossary entry on visual hierarchy explains the idea behind it.

Set body text at 18 pt or larger when you present the deck. That is Microsoft's accessibility guidance, which also asks for sufficient white space and sufficient contrast between text and background, and which offers an Accessibility Checker under Review → Check Accessibility. Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule is stricter and asks for 30 pt, but it was written for investor pitches. The guide to presentation rules shows where it helps and where it misleads.

These ranges are starting points from our own practice, not rules. If text does not fit at 18 pt, shorten it or split the slide. Shrinking the font is the fix that makes the deck harder to read. A deck people read on their own screens, a pre-read, can carry denser tables and smaller text than one you present, so decide which one you are building before you set sizes. To check whether text will be readable at the back of the room, use the font size calculator. For text on colored backgrounds, the slide contrast checker tests the color pair.

Set them in the theme on the slide master, not text box by text box. The desktop app is required, because PowerPoint for the web has no slide master.

The details of the master are in the slide master guide, and the corporate design template guide shows how to turn the result into a template your team can reuse. Microsoft describes the steps on its page about changing the fonts in a presentation.

Because a PowerPoint file normally stores the name of each font, not the font itself. When the computer that opens the file does not have that font, PowerPoint substitutes another one. The substitute often has different letter widths, so text runs wider or narrower, lines break in new places and a title that fit on two lines needs three. Microsoft's page on embedding fonts addresses this case: you share a file with someone who does not have the fonts installed that you have.

Office cloud fonts are the exception. Microsoft hosts many Office fonts in the cloud, and its cloud fonts page says they are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers whose device is online. A cloud font downloads when a file needs it. The list includes Aptos, Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Courier New, Georgia and Garamond, among many others. If a cloud font does not arrive, Microsoft advises making sure your IT admin has not blocked https://fs.microsoft.com. On Windows, also check under File → Account → Manage Settings (Account Privacy) that Optional connected experiences is on, because clearing it turns cloud fonts off.

Use the Save options on Windows, or Preferences on a Mac.

On a Mac, PowerPoint for Microsoft 365, 2024 and 2021 embed fonts too, with the settings under PowerPoint → Preferences → Save, as Microsoft's page on fonts that cannot be saved with a presentation names them.

Not every font can be embedded. Microsoft says not all TrueType fonts can be embedded, prefers OpenType (.otf) or TrueType (.ttf) and advises avoiding PostScript fonts (.pfb, .pfm). A font cannot be saved with the presentation if its type is unsupported or its creator did not grant permission. On Windows, Control Panel → Fonts shows each font's embeddability. Embedding is also a license question: embed only fonts whose license allows it.

The font you choose in the editor is the font each export uses. PowerPoint and Word files name it as you chose it, and PDF, PNG and JPG are drawn with the editor's own fonts, so they look the same on every device.

The editor offers 143 font families, nearly all under the SIL Open Font License, which allows commercial use and embedding in documents but not selling the font by itself (license FAQ). Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Cambria, Courier New and Georgia are drawn with metric-compatible look-alikes, for example Carlito for Calibri, and named as the Office font in the file. Metric-compatible means the look-alike has the same character widths as the original, so lines break in the same places in PowerPoint.

Brand fonts work too. On the Brand page you can upload up to 12 fonts as TTF, OTF, WOFF or WOFF2 files of up to 2 MB each, and the editor, PDF, PNG and JPG use them while the brand is active. PowerPoint and Word files name the font, so it shows on every computer where it is installed. Upload only fonts whose license allows it. When you open a .pptx, fonts embedded in the file are used. To change a font on every page at once, ask the AI.

The AI applies the change to every page in one request. Treat the result as a first version and check long titles and tables on every page, because a different font changes how text wraps. How an existing design carries over is described on the page about AI presentations in your company template.