Font families
Fonts are now grouped into their respective families for easy navigation and searching. Now, instead of scrolling through Arial Regular, Arial Italic, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic etc. to get to Arial Nova, the different styles have been moved into flyout menus. This reduces the length of the font list, saving anyone regularly using fonts beginning with ‘W’ some serious RSI!
Screenshot of the font drop down list. The font Arial is selected and a fly out menu on the right lists the different Arial styles e.g. regular, italic, bold.
Organization
Font families are now grouped under three* headers:
Most Recently Used, Pinned Fonts and Office Fonts.
Screenshot of the Microsoft font picker. A small drop down menu is open with the three headings described above.
The Most Recently Used dropdown lists the 10 most recently used fonts in reverse chronological order (ensuring your theme fonts are at the top of the list).
Pinned Fonts is a personal favorite (yes, I’m phone numbers denmark the kind of person that has favorite types of font lists!). It can include font families or individual font styles and can be personalized and edited at any time using the small pin icon next to each font name. If you have ‘go-to’ fonts, you can pop them all in the Pinned Fonts list for easy access.
Screenshot of the microsoft font picker zoomed into the font Arial. To the left of the font is a pin icon, a pop out says 'Pin font'.
Office Fonts contains the list of font styles supported by Office software.
This new organization allows you to search for fonts in a more dynamic way and easily access commonly used fonts making the whole process much simpler and more enjoyable.
* You may see a fourth heading, Organization Fonts, if your IT administrator has deployed your brand fonts via a SharePoint Asset Library. You can read more about that here: Microsoft documentation.
An information icon may appear next to a font style in your list. This can indicate that the font is a theme font or an embedded font. If, like me, you spend hours scouring your decks looking for pesky fonts that shouldn’t be there, this will be a welcome addition. It makes finding embedded fonts much easier. You can click on the icons for more information on the font itself. Cleverly, the information icon will turn to a warning triangle if the font picker notices a missing font in your document. This warning alerts you to fonts used in the file that are not installed on your machine, so you can either install the correct fonts or change the font to one you do have. This is a huge advantage and provides a great insight into your document making sure you won’t share files with wonky formatting by accident.