Exploring the new Microsoft Font Picker
We’re all looking for ways to make our lives easier and, though I can’t kick unnecessary calls from your calendar or whip up a midweek meal whilst you put your feet up, I can tell you about a Microsoft update that might just save you some time – the Microsoft Modern Font Picker.
Why are we so excited about the Modern Font Picker? Let’s set the scene…
We’ve all been there. You’re creating a project in a Microsoft program and need to change the font. You highlight the relevant text, move your mouse to the font drop down menu and start the never ending scroll down an ever-growing list of fonts to find the one you need. Or, if you’re a little savvy, you start to type in the font name, inevitably make a typo and lose the font in the list. This has been me, hundreds of times! Fear not fellow scrollers and typers, our calls for help have been answered!
Microsoft have recently updated their font interface in the online Office app and have included lots of new features to streamline working with fonts. Here’s a brief list of Microsoft’s new-look Modern Font Picker features and a few tips on how to use them to boost productivity and save enough time for a cuppa.
Font families
Fonts are now grouped into their respective families for easy navigation and searching. Now, instead of scrolling through Arial Regular, Arial Italic, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic etc. to get to Arial Nova, the different styles have been moved into flyout menus. This reduces the length of the font list, saving anyone regularly using fonts beginning with ‘W’ some serious RSI!
Organization
Font families are now grouped under three* headers:
Most Recently Used, Pinned Fonts and Office Fonts.
- The Most Recently Used dropdown lists the 10 most recently used fonts in reverse chronological order (ensuring your theme fonts are at the top of the list).
- Pinned Fonts is a personal favorite (yes, I’m the kind of person that has favorite types of font lists!). It can include font families or individual font styles and can be personalized and edited at any time using the small pin icon next to each font name. If you have ‘go-to’ fonts, you can pop them all in the Pinned Fonts list for easy access.
- Office Fonts contains the list of font styles supported by Office software.
This new organization allows you to search for fonts in a more dynamic way and easily access commonly used fonts making the whole process much simpler and more enjoyable.
* You may see a fourth heading, Organization Fonts, if your IT administrator has deployed your brand fonts via a SharePoint Asset Library. You can read more about that here: Microsoft documentation.
Font information
An information icon may appear next to a font style in your list. This can indicate that the font is a theme font or an embedded font. If, like me, you spend hours scouring your decks looking for pesky fonts that shouldn’t be there, this will be a welcome addition. It makes finding embedded fonts much easier. You can click on the icons for more information on the font itself. Cleverly, the information icon will turn to a warning triangle if the font picker notices a missing font in your document. This warning alerts you to fonts used in the file that are not installed on your machine, so you can either install the correct fonts or change the font to one you do have. This is a huge advantage and provides a great insight into your document making sure you won’t share files with wonky formatting by accident.
About this font
Clicking into a font family menu and selecting About this Font at the bottom of the list opens an information panel. Here you can find information about typefaces, weights or letter forms relating to that font family. You can also read about the history behind the font and, impressively, whether it’s a compatibility font. Fonts in the ‘Compatibility font’ group will automatically download and display correctly on any device even if the font wasn’t installed. Magic!
Microsoft’s font process really has had a spring clean, and the new features make light work of editing your text. The new Microsoft Modern Font Picker is currently only available in the Online browser platform, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for a release to the desktop app very soon! Fellow scrollers, our lives just got easier, one font at a time.
