There are two basic types of fonts, serif and sans serif. Create a presentation that will look good on any station or device. People check their emails more and more on the go, and your presentation will suffer if it is not legible on their devices because of poor font choice. Mobile technology has progressed, but in 2012, presenting a full deck of slides on a mobile device is not customary. The font library on a mobile device is even more restricted than that installed on a Mac or a Windows machine. Tablets and mobile devices create additional issues for fonts. With an increasing number of people switching to Mac platforms, I would hence not rely on custom fonts. In PowerPoint for Mac OSX, you cannot do this. PowerPoint offers the ability to similarly embed fonts into a presentation, but this feature only works on the Microsoft Windows platform.

In other file formats, such as PDF or images (JPG, PNG), fonts are baked in as pixels, so the text appears just as you designed and intended it, regardless of the fonts installed on your machine. Such font issues only occur with software that enables text to be edited, such as PowerPoint, Keynote, Word, etc. An entire chart can be thrown into chaos. Text boxes created just wide enough to fit a crucial sentence, now suddenly cut off an extra line added due to the random font replacement. Your characters will look different from what you intended and the worst of it is, that different fonts have slightly different sizes. While this might work for a textual document or email, it is a disaster for a carefully crafted presentation. When you open a PowerPoint or Keynote file, any custom font not installed, will automatically be replaced by your operating system. The first choice you have to make, is whether to use custom fonts or stick to the standard ones installed on your computer. If not, its important you make a number of educated decisions regarding fonts.

If you are bound by a corporate presentation template, where font use has already been decided for you, skip this section and move on to the next chapter. Fonts greatly impact the look and feel of your presentation.

Best fonts for presentations powerpoint