Replace fonts workaround: Locating pesky PowerPoint fonts

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. 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!