Using a PowerPoint presentation requires a lot of preparation. One of the areas of a PowerPoint presentation that needs a lot of concentration is the choosing of the correct font for the presentation. This is because the font has a large impact on the look and feel of your presentation and is a great means of grabbing the audience's attention!



People are usually under the impression that a specialty font will make your presentation look unique. However, on the contrary, one of the problems of using a specialty font is that if you email your presentation to someone who doesn't have the font installed in the computer, then the presentation will default to a system font of the computer. All the effort put into the PowerPoint presentation will go to waste! However, to overcome this problem, you may embed your fonts while saving the PowerPoint presentation. This however will increase your file size, which is not a good point when emailing your presentation, as smaller files are better for emailing.

It is always better to use common fonts for your presentation like Arial or Times New

Roman as almost everyone has these fonts in their machines. This way you are sure your presentation will display as intended. Although your designer may say that your presentation may not look exciting using a common font, it is the better font as it is widely accepted on most machines! Another rule on using fonts is to always avoid using more than two typestyles within a single PowerPoint presentation as this only helps in wavering the concentration of the audience. They tend to pay more attention to the different types of fonts used in the presentation, than to listen to the presentation! Moreover, in certain components of PowerPoint like the organization chart, too many fonts may give you nightmares by crashing everytime you use it. So make it a point to reduce the number of fonts installed to a more manageable level to avoid disappointments in the PowerPoint presentation.

In the printed world, one usually uses a sans serif font and a serif font for the title and matter of the text. However, in PowerPoint presentations, it is possible to use sans serif fonts in both the titles and the body of the text. Use fonts that are legible from all perceived angles and distances. When mixing two different fonts, it is important that the x-height of the font be considered. The x-height of the font is the height of the lowercase of the alphabet and of the height of lowercase letters like c, a, and e. Though two fonts may be the same point size, as they have different x-heights, one font may look bigger than the other in the PowerPoint presentation. In such situations, to maintain uniformity in the PowerPoint presentation, you will have to make a compensation on the font size of the text with a smaller x-height.

It is not advisable to overload a slide with text in small sizes. Instead, try dividing the content into two or more slides as this makes the reading of the slide easier. If there is any copyright notice or other legal stuff that you have to use in your PowerPoint presentation, then it is okay to use a smaller font; but don't make it so small that the audience has to squint their eyes to read the text! There are cases when a font does not allow embedding. In such cases, you can typeset the particular font in a vector graphics program like Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand or Xara X. This text is then exported to a capable vector format like EMF or WMF; to be imported as a graphic in PowerPoint.

Another interesting aspect of PowerPoint presentations is that there are dingbat bullets that are basically a lot of fun. Most of them are simple in character, and make excellent bullets for a bulleted list in a PowerPoint presentation. For example, while doing a presentation for a burger industry, you could substitute the boring round bullet with one symbolizing a burger! This is very interesting, but can turn out to be dangerous if gone overboard! Choosing the right font for your PowerPoint presentation can be fun; just follow the rules to get the most from your presentations!