By Jon K. Hooper
This column is a series designed to help enhance your PowerPoint presentations. Each edition pinpoints common pitfalls faced when planning, preparing, and presenting PowerPoint shows.
Pitfall: Not Embedding TrueType Fonts
Jack: When I loaded my PowerPoint show onto my host’s computer at the conference, my fonts changed to bizarre, futuristic ones.
Jill: You experienced a font shift! Did you embed your fonts when you created the show?
Jack: Say what? I’m not a computer nerd. If I had fiddled with PowerPoint’s inner workings, I would have really screwed things up!
Jill: Seems to me you screwed things up without fiddling with PowerPoint!
When you transfer a presentation from one computer to another, sometimes the wrong fonts show up on the screen. This occurs because the second computer does not have the same fonts installed. This problem can easily be solved by “embedding” your fonts into your show. Embedded fonts are part of a file so they travel with the file from computer to computer. The down side is that embedding fonts increases a file’s size and only some TrueType fonts can be embedded in PowerPoint (TrueType fonts have small blue “TT” icons when viewed in your Windows Fonts folder). Unfortunately, you can not embed fonts in Mac versions of PowerPoint.
To Purge the Pitfall
To solve this problem when initially saving your file in PowerPoint 2007, follow these steps:
- Click the Office button in the upper left corner of the screen, then click Save As.
- In the “Save As” dialog box, click Tools in the lower left corner, then click Save Options.
- Click the box in front of “Embed fonts in the file” (so a checkmark appears).
- Select “Embed all characters (best for editing by other people).” If you want to keep the file size down for a show that will only be displayed but not edited on another computer, select “Embed only the characters used in the presentation (best for reducing file size).” Be aware that with this latter approach, any letter (e.g., “z”) that you never used when creating the show on your first computer will not be available when you open the show on a second computer unless the font you’re using was already loaded on the second computer.
- Click OK to finalize the embedding process then give your show a file name and click Save.
Final Thoughts
Font “shifts” that occur when you create your show on one computer yet present the show on another computer can ruin a PowerPoint presentation. Simple adjustments to PowerPoint’s “Embed fonts in the file” setting can eliminate this pitfall. Of course, you can avoid this pitfall altogether by sticking to a basic typeface such as Arial that is available on almost all computers. You could also simply prepare and present your show using the same computer.
Dr. Jon Hooper has over 30 years of experience helping natural and cultural resource professionals enhance the effectiveness of their communication efforts. He is a professor of environmental interpretation at California State University, Chico, and is the owner of Verbal Victories Communication Consulting. He is a Certified Interpretive Trainer (CIT) and was Project WILD’s national Facilitator of the Year in 2006. Contact Jon at jonkhooper@hotmail.com.
