Font Problems with PowerPoint

[Cheerful]

I have looked and looked online for advice, but couldn't find any so I'm trying a post here. I volunteer to put together our church's PowerPoint presentations. I have a pretty good working knowledge of computers, but it's not like I was hired for my computer skills to do this job. My problem is that some of the slides that I need to use keep changing font size.

I get an email containing the week's announcements from the church. I open my presentation, click "new slide" then "reuse slides," find and open the document, then try to paste the announcements into my presentation. Even though I almost always choose to "keep source formatting," the font size is always wrong on some of the slides (not all of the slides). It happens whether I paste using that method or if I open the announcements, copy, open my presentation, and paste directly into that. I believe that the text always shrinks; I don't think that it's ever gotten larger. My computer and the church's computers are all runnning Office 2007.

The strange thing is that if I open the announcement file itself on my computer, the announcements look fine. It's only when I try to copy them into another document that some of them get messed up. We can't figure out any pattern in which ones cause a problem. What is happening to change the font size on me? Yes, I can manually change all affected slides each week, but I would far rather not have to do it constantly or have to worry about forgetting some week. Thank you so much for any help you can provide. This is driving me crazy!

[Paris MkVI]

Do you have the exact same font installed on your system, or is it substituting one font for another?

[daver2]

Cheerful,

First of all, welcome to CMN.

In my experience it is usually the creator of the document using a font that is not available on the machine you are displaying it on. Your machine is then trying to do the best it can. The fonts can be embedded in the document itself so they display correctly when the document is opened - but when the text is copied to another document, the font attributes are copied but (because the required font is not available on your machine) PowerPoint tries to do the best it can and guesses...

If you are using Windows/XP run "Start->Control Panel" and then double click on the "Fonts" icon. A window should open up listing the fonts which are available on your machine.

You should restrict the font usage on presentations and documents to a very limited set which are available on all of your machines. This should overcome the bulk of your problems if followed. We have had this policy in place for many years and it is still broken at least once a month by one pastor or another!

Another possibility is that the default settings for the two machines are different. I am guessing at this for PowerPoint - but it has caught many people out in Word. Word starts off with the defaults defined by NORMAL.DOT if one person has set 20 point Times New Roman and another person has set 10 point Courier New as their font defaults and you copy from one document to another without the formatting information then the font type and size will change during the copy. As I said - I am not too familiar with this in PowerPoint.

Dave

[Cheerful]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm thinking that it might be a font problem, but no one seems to be in the church anymore today to answer my questions about it. The altered fonts from this week appear in my presentation (after the slides have been copied and pasted) as Arial 18. When I open the announcement file itself up on my computer, though, the fonts appear as Calibri 30 or 40-something. I'll request that they only be made in the future using standard fonts or at least with the fonts embedded. If it is just a problem with the installed set of fonts, though, does it make sense that they would they appear different if I look at the original file as opposed to the copied version of the file?