What are the best fonts to use for a presentation?

There are so many fonts available with microsoft office, it can be difficult to figure out which fonts to use for your PowerPoint Presentation. We have asked our readers what their ideas about this are.

What are the best fonts to use for a presentation?

I have opened some presentations that seem to use the Univers font but the text appears all over the place

The Presentation Doctor suggests: 

For a presentation it is best to use a “Sans Serif” font.

The best presentation fonts are Arial, Tahoma and Verdana. Of these Verdana can be used as a headline font.

You can use fancier “sans serif” fonts like Univers and Trebuchet but these have a problem that are not commonly available in most people’s machines. As a result if you use a font like Univers and email it to someone else PowerPoint uses it’s default font and commonly will also use the default formatting. This can make the text quite a mess. You can also email the fonts, but most people have no idea of how these need to be installed. These fancy fonts look very nice, but if you need to distribute your presentation – either by email or for the conference organisers to print out – you will would probably be advised to stick with Arial, Tahoma or Verdana.

Times New Roman is not suitable as it is a Serif Font. Lots of people misuse it in presentations because they have used it in word documents where it is used to make lots of small text easy to read.

The Presentation Wizzard Suggests: 

I have also found a website that can help you to identify a font it is called Identifont, It asks you a series of around 20 questions and gradually narrows down the fonts until you can find the right one to use.

I seem to recall that there is another online site where you can send off a jpeg of the font and it will produce an online identification of it. This is quite useful if you need to be able to match a font.

Also check out a site called “What the font”. You can upload a GIF file and it will give you the best answer of what the font is. I have tried it a little while ago and it seems to work well.

K visuals suggests: 

I use Arial, with title size around 28 bold and subheadings 28 normal and the body of the text around 20. I would say Arial is probably the best font to use for most business presentations.

Taj Simmons suggests: 

All great advice…… but may I just add, whatever font you use, make it large enough for the people on the back row to read