Make sure my chosen fonts are available

When you distribute presentations that will run on computers other than your own, you want to ensure that the fonts you choose will be available on the other systems. If a needed font isn't availalble, PowerPoint substitutes one of the available fonts. If the substitute matches your original font fairly well, the change may not even be noticeable to most people. But sometimes the new font is so different that your text is all rearranged.

Windows/MacOS, Office and other programs all may install fonts on your computer. Depending on the options you choose when you install Office, you may get more or fewer fonts. Because of all that, it's hard to be sure that a font on your computer will be available when someone else opens your presentation on their computer. You can't assume that anyone else has the same set of fonts that you have.

Microsoft has published a very useful list of the fonts that come with various versions of Office

You can also visit Microsoft's font lists page for lists of the fonts installed with many MS products and operating systems. The lists are badly out of date but are still quite useful when you need to know what fonts came with older versions of Windows or other MS programs.

You may also want to read this FAQ about FONT embedding. In some cases, you can embed fonts in your presentations to ensure that they're available on at least any Windows target system.

If you need to be absolutely certain that no font substitutions happen, choose a font that comes with all versions of Windows or MacOS that your presentation will run on. Here are some lists that'll help you choose:

In the list below, "(4)" after the font name means that the four standard styles, Normal, Bold, Italic and Bold-Italic, are included.

Windows 95
Arial (4)
Times New Roman (4)
Courier New (4)
Symbol
Wingdings

Windows 98 SE Normal fonts
Arial (4)
Courier New (4)
Times New Roman (4)
Symbol
Tahoma (normal & bold)
Lucida Console
Wingdings

Windows 98 SE - Web Fonts (optional)
Arial Black
Comic Sans (normal and bold)
Impact
Verdana (4)
Webdings

Windows ME
(provisional listing from the contents of CAB20)

Century Gothic
Impact
Lucida Hand
Lucida Sans
Lucida Unicode
Marlett
Matisse
News Gothic MT
OCR A Extended
Symbol
Tahoma
Tempus Sans ITC
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Webdings
Westminster
Wingdings

Installed by Office 2000
Some of these fonts are already part of most Windows installs. These are newer versions, by and large, and will replace the existing fonts. The newer versions are larger files and contain more characters.

Office 97 includes most if not all of these fonts.

Arial (4)
Arial Black
Arial Narrow (4)
Bookman Old Style (4)
Century Gothic (4)
Comic Sans MS (regular and bold)
Courier New (4)
Garamond (4)
Hattenschweiler
Impact
Lucida Console
Monotype Corsiva
Symbol
Tahoma (regular and bold)
Times New Roman (4)
Trebuchet (4)
Verdana (4)
Webdings
WingDings
WingDings2
WingDings3

Office 2000 may also include ArialUni (Arial Unicode), PMingLiU and SimSun (Chinese?), MS Mincho (Japanese), Batang (?).

See this list of fonts that come with various versions of Office for more recent Office versions.