This Hints and Tips post provides a brief overview of PowerPoint templates and the steps for how to set or change the Theme Font in your PowerPoint presentation.

As noted in previous posts, PowerPoint Templates are a combination of Themes and Slide layouts. Each aspect of the Template is important to achieve the desired look and feel for your presentation. Using a theme gives your presentation a consistent appearance.

The Fonts which appear by default in a PowerPoint presentation are managed via the Theme in the Presentation’s Template.

To change the default font in a Template, you will need to update the Theme Font in the Slide Master.

To access your Master Slides, navigate to the View tab and select Slide Master. From the top ribbon, select the ‘Fonts’ drop-down menu

In the Fonts drop-down menu, you will find a list of all the standard PowerPoint fonts. You can select any of these font combinations and they will be applied to all the slides in your presentation automatically.

Notice the change in font from the image above to the image below.

You can also customize your Theme Font - for example so that you can nominate one type of Font for Heading text and a different type of font for Body text.

To create a New Theme Font, select ‘Customize Fonts’ from the Font drop-down menu.

The ‘Create New Theme Font’ dialogue box will open.

From the Create New Theme Font popup you can select from the drop-downs the Heading font style and the Body font style. Once you have made your selections, name your new theme font so you can easily find it again and click save. The fonts throughout your presentation will automatically be updated to your customized theme font.

Your new custom theme font combination can be found under the ‘Custom’ list on the ‘Fonts’ drop-down menu.  

If you need to make any changes to your custom theme font, simply right-click on the theme in the ‘Fonts’ dropdown menu, select Edit to open the ‘Edit Theme Fonts’ dialogue box, make the changes required and hit save.

Changes to the Theme Font will be automatically applied to your presentation.

Want to learn more about working with PowerPoint templates? See our posts on how to Create Custom Templates and Color Palettes in PowerPoint.