We’ve been investigating what gets lost in translation when you open a file from Microsoft PowerPoint in Google Slides. While both platforms broadly serve the same purpose, there are lots of differences between the two and we’ve noticed certain glitches and issues when you convert PowerPoint to Google Slides. Here's what to look out for.
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5th Sep 2019
Replace fonts workaround: Locating pesky PowerPoint fonts
- Written by: Lucy Wyatt
- Categories: PowerPoint design
- Comments: 47
Sometimes we struggle to find things and get frustrated when they don’t appear, whether it’s locating your house keys, finding Wally in a sea of Wally impostors or hunting down the partner to that lone sock at the bottom of the washing basket. Or maybe it’s replacing fonts that PowerPoint says are present in your file, but you just can’t find and your childhood Wally searching skills are letting you down. Well, this post can help you with PowerPoint, but you’ll have to find the sock yourself, sorry!
You may already know how to replace fonts in PowerPoint using the Replace Fonts button. You can find it in the Editing options under the Home tab. Clicking Replace Fonts brings up two dropdown menus, the first of which includes all the fonts used in your deck. The second allows you to replace any of those fonts with another font.
Replacing PowerPoint fonts in this way usually works. However, the tool’s ability to search inside a PowerPoint file is somewhat limited. We have witnessed some instances where PowerPoint doesn’t make the alteration and the font you wanted to replace still appears in the first drop-down menu – this means it’s hidden in your deck somewhere.
Why is this a problem? Well, it can become an issue in multiple ways. Warning messages might appear when you send the file to people who don’t have that particular font installed and trying to embed fonts in the file can pose an issue too. This can be caused by double-byte/non-western fonts being present in the presentation, PowerPoint will not let you replace a double-byte font with a standard singe-byte font but finding them by eye and replacing them isn’t always an option.
You can solve this issue by doing the following:
Let’s say we have the fonts Arial, Calibri and Avenir currently in the font list. We’ve tried to replace them and just keep Arial, but it didn’t work. What next?
- Open the PowerPoint file that has the font issue and save it as a PowerPoint XML presentation (*.xml)
- Close PowerPoint, locate the PowerPoint XML file and open it using a text editor (I used Microsoft Notepad – it looks a bit scary but don’t worry!)
- When the file is open in Notepad locate the Replace option (found under the Edit tab)
- Add ‘Calibri’ to the Find what: option and ‘Arial’ to the Replace with: option and choose Replace All
- Do the same for any other fonts that you don’t want in the document, here we follow the same steps for Avenir
- Then save the Notepad file (*xml) and close
- Locate the (*xml) file and open it in PowerPoint
- Save file back out as a (*pptx)
Like a (slightly complicated) wave of a wand, when you open the file again those pesky fonts should have disappeared from the Replace Fonts dropdown menu, removing this potential font issue
from your file.
Just a few further notes on this PowerPoint fonts problem:
- As stated, you aren’t able to replace double-byte fonts with single-byte fonts using the Replace Fonts tool but you can unintentionally do this using the method above, so be sure you know which fonts you are replacing.
- If you use the search/replace for font names within your presentation you will also replace font names that happen to be within your presentation’s text, so keep an eye out for this.
- It’s worth checking your fonts list whenever you choose to embed fonts to ensure you’re not saving files you didn’t know were in the presentation. This could help prevent issues further down the line.
Phew! Fonts found.
If this is a problem you’re battling day after day, then it might be worth investing in a more robust solution. Check out our review of Slidewise. This tool lets you view all fonts in your file, jump to their location and remove or replace them. All within PowerPoint!
You can put down your magnifying glass now, call off the search and use your time more wisely by reading our blog post on the best fonts to use in PowerPoint, or going and looking for that sock!
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Thank you so much! It works beautifully! Bookmarking this article for future reference.
You are awesome! This saved me so much work!
Sorry, but the statement “This can be caused by double-byte/non-western fonts being present in the presentation, PowerPoint will not let you replace a double-byte font with a standard singe-byte font…” is abracadabra to me. What is all that?
Single-byte fonts are encoded using one byte per character and can support up to 256 characters (but can not exceed). English language, for example, only has 26 characters in its alphabet, plus numbers, plus punctuation and various special characters. The total number of English characters fits into a table that only requires one byte of data to represent each character.
Then if you then consider languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, these languages have thousands of characters which can’t fit into a table represented by a single byte (this would exceed the 256 character limit). So these fonts are encoded with two bytes (double-byte fonts), which can support up to 65,535 characters.
The problem faced by PowerPoint is that it can’t replace a double-byte font with a single-byte font as the two character tables are different sizes.
Brilliant hack, thanks!
I’ve been trying to fix this issue for years, thank god for this article, you’re a legend!
wonderful, especially the XML bit. Thanks for sharing!
any idea why I can’t save the file as *.xml in powerpoint for mac? Not showing as an available file type…
Hi springgate and thanks for a great question. Mac doesn’t support the creation of presentations with the XML extension in either it’s Save As or Export features. On Mac you have a couple of options. You can either use a VM (Virtual Machine) such as Parallels and save from Windows or if you don’t run a VM you can get the to XML of the presentation even while it’s in its PPTX format. If you save your file as .pptx and then change it to .zip you’ll be able to use your preferred archive utility to unzip the raw XML of the entire presentation to a new folder. From there, you can use a text editor to perform the same search and replace before zipping up the archive and changing the extension back to pptx. It’s a bit more tricky and prone to breaking the file so make sure you create a backup first.
This is so helpful! Thx a ton!
OMG, THANK YOU! This was bothering me so much. Perfect fix.
What an indictment of MS Office, that you need to manually edit an XML file (as I did) just to find and remove fonts! Thank you for the advice – I would have spent hours trying to figure that out for myself.
Thank you!
This is amazing!! What a life saver. Turns out XML is really the key (also helpful for removing custom colors). Thank you so much!!!
Game Changer! will use this little hack again. Thank Lucy.
Thank you so much man! This really saved me!
That was awesome – I have scoured the internet for ages to find the solution, this is the only thing that solved the problem Thanks!
Very, very helpful.
Btw to avoid replacing a font name that is part of the regular text, search and replace the font name with quotation marks—provided that’s not part of the text.
Brilliant, thank you so much!!!
This has been driving me mad for years – I spend all my time in PPT, and fonts are shared and embedded, renamed on macs, etc – it’s a nightmare. Thanks so much for the simple fix!
THANK YOU SO MUCH! Thought I was faced with having to recreate 3 particularly complicated templates!
This problem bugged me since a long time, now it’s solved.
Thank you very much, this really helped – unlike the “help” you get from microsoft…
Great tip on the XML workaround! It was so frustrating to get that “General Failure” message every time I saved the file. Now working perfectly 🙂
YOU JUST SAVED ME!!!
Thank you! This article was very helpful. Saved me a lot of trouble.
You are a life saver! Thanks!
Flippin’ Brilliant – thanks
Awesome, Worked like a charm!
I got the same cannot be saved message when I tried to save it as XML. Any other way around this problem? I tried to Open the PowerPoint file with Notepad and perform your steps but to no avail.
This is awesome! So glad I found your page. I was able to resolve the font issue but not the font size. I am unable to change the font size.
Amazing! This has driven me crazy for years. Thanks so much for this time-saving tip Lucy.
Wow, thank you!
when I do this and try to save the .XML back as a .ppt I get the same error with the new font type except it make the font name plural (ie adds an ‘s’), when I do a search in notepad, the font is named correctly. any suggestions? I am using Office 365.
omg thank you… now we just need something similar for languages so as spell checking is useful again.
Matthew our free BrightSlide add-in has a function (Review > Presentation Language) where you can set the language for an entire presentation, which ought to catch/fix random elements in different languages.
Thank you so much, i was facing this issue since long time and saving as XML and replacing the invalid font tip was very useful . Thank you
Thank you! Is there any option to replace a font in the entire presentation for a specific character. Let’s say, I would like to change font only for dots in the deck but I would like to keep the rest in the original font. Any idea please?
Thank you so much!
I was so hopeful with these steps, but I am unable to open back up the XML file in PowerPoint after having made the font changes in Notepad. I’m on a Windows computer, and using Office 365. My only options are to open the file in Internet Explorer (still opens in text formatting), back in Notepad, or WordPad. What am I missing here??
I’m having the same problem
Thank you this is super useful. I have been struggling with this for a while!
@Faith, you can try the following: put a shortcut to Ppt on your desktop, and then right click on your XML file, “Open with”, and go fetch your PowerPoint shortcut. It worked for me.
Thank you!
Thank you this is super useful.
Thank you, so much! This is really helpful!
Thank you! I first discovered there was such issue and tried the first approach, when I dig deeper in Google search, I found this solution and it helped!
Thank you. Finally a great solution to this nagging powerpoint problem.
You are a life saver. Thank you and God bless.
P.S. Microsoft smells.
Very nice, very helpful!
This only works on Windows. It’s impossible to save to PowerPoint XML on Mac side. Instead, you will have to change the extension to zip, unzip the pptx file, make changes to the slideMaster1.xml and then zip the file back (not the top-level folder, but its actual content). PowerPoint will complain that the file needs to be fixed (post probably it keeps some kind of a checksum), but it will fix the file and all will work as intended.