Microsoft Office Tutorials: Issues with fonts in office for macos

Last Updated: May 15, 2018

ISSUE

Users may see issues with fonts when using version 16.9 of Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote and Microsoft PowerPoint on macOS.

Symptoms:

Text appears garbled or in a different font.
Some fonts including Times New Roman are missing or unavailable in the font picker.
Some fonts are being substituted with other fonts.
You may see a message bar saying "We were unable to load all your fonts. Some fonts may be missing."

STATUS: WORKAROUND

We recommend you follow these steps:

Check the installed versions of the font. If you have multiple versions, then make sure the latest version of the font is active.
If you have a single version of font, check the font type. If the font type is displayed as "PostScript-Type1", we recommend you upgrade it to a newer "OpenType" version of the font.
If you have a large number of fonts installed on your system, Microsoft Office apps may not be able to load all the fonts. This causes some fonts not to appear in the font picker. You can work around this by setting the fonts you need that do not appear as prioritized fonts.

To resolve multiple version of fonts and make the latest version active

If Font Book application is already open, quit it
Launch Font Book (open applications folder in Finder, find and launch "Font book.app")
Select All Fonts from the leftmost pane
Select the Font Info button (inscribed "i") from the top bar or press Command + i so that the rightmost pane is displaying font information
Find the font in question in the middle pane and expand the selection. You should see duplicate entries of each face, with some of them marked as Off.
For each face that's marked Off, right click it and Enable it. You should then see warnings that there are multiple copies of the font installed in the rightmost pane.
Select to Manually Resolve the duplicates, then select the latest version to use as the Active Copy from the pop up.

To check the installed version of fonts

Launch Font Book (open applications folder in Finder, find and launch "Font book.app")
Select the Font Info button ("i") from the top bar or press Command + i so that the rightmost pane is displaying font information.
Search for the font in the search box and select it from the middle pane and expand the selection
If you have multiple versions of the font, you should see duplicate entries of each face, with some of them marked as Off.
Note the font version specified with "version" in the right pane and the font type.

To set prioritized fonts

Find the postscript names of the fonts that you want to prioritize.

Note: Postscript names are not the same as font families and each style will have a different postscript name, so to prioritize an entire font family you may need to add multiple names.
- Launch Font Book (open applications folder in Finder, find and launch "Font book.app")
- Select the font you want to prioritize in the center pane
- Ensure Font Information is selected in the top left of the window, and find the PostScript Name field in the right pane and copy it.
Quit all Office apps
Launch Terminal.app
Type the command 'defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "postscript name 1" "postscript name 2" "etc."' and hit return to run it. Postscript names here are case-sensitive and must match exactly what Font Book.app provides. You can specify up to 50 names. e.g. defaults write com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts -array "Helvetica-Light" "Helvetica" "Helvetica-LightOblique" "TimesNewRomanPSMT"
Launch your Office apps. One your apps have loaded, quit your Microsoft Office apps and relaunch them a second time to see your updated fonts list.

Note: Prioritized fonts is only supported for Word and PowerPoint for macOS. To delete the prioritized fonts list, close all Office apps, launch Terminal.app and then run the following command: "defaults delete com.microsoft.office PrioritizedFonts".

Provide Feedback

We need your feedback to help us deliver great products.

You can use the Smiley feedback icon feedback tool in the upper-right corner of your app to send feedback directly to our team. Please include the name and version number of the font. Thank you.