It’s a common problem. You have created a PowerPoint Presentation or a Word Document that looks good on your computer but when you send the same file to a client or a colleague, all they see are some gibberish characters. Did the file got corrupted during transit?

The reason is often missing fonts. You may have used some beautiful but uncommon fonts to design that presentation on your computer but since those fonts are not available on your colleague’s computer, the presentation will look plan and a lot less elegant on their screen.

One option is that you zip the necessary font files and send them along with your presentation but, unless you are using an open source font, the license won’t allow you share the font with another user - much like a software license, you are not expected to share the serial number of a software you’ve purchase with your colleagues.

The other alternative is that you embed the font into the presentation or the document itself though this will obviously increase the over byte size of the Office file.

How to Embed Fonts in Office Documents

To embed a font in an Office file, launch PowerPoint and open the corresponding presentation. Now go to Options –> Save and under “Preserve fidelity when sharing this presentation,” select “embed fonts in the file”. You may use also choose “Embed only the characters used in the presentation” to slightly reduce the size of your presentation.

The settings are pretty similar for Microsoft Office Word as well.

Microsoft Office can embed OpenType and TrueType fonts but it is important to not that certain fonts cannot be embedded in documents if the font publisher has restricted embedding in the font license.