You sent your colleague a PowerPoint file of a poster, and he tells you that all the paragraphs run over into the pictures. It’s a mess! What went wrong?

Usuaslly what’s happening is that you have used a font installed on your computer, but your colleague does not have that font on his. PowerPoint will substitute Times New Roman on his computer. The games begin. He can’t figure out why the poster looks different on his computer.

The problem is that every font has different spacing between the letters, and PowerPoint will reflow text to fit into the text boxes.

If we could get everyone to use Arial for titles, Times New Roman for paragraphs, and Symbol for all the greek letters, our lives would be much easier! Everybody has those fonts installed as part of the system installation.

An easy way to check that all the fonts are loaded on your machine is to do format>replace fonts and drop the replace box down. If you see a ? in front of a font, it was used in the document, but PowerPoint can’t find it on your computer. In 2007, it’s under Home>replace>replace fonts.