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How do I remove mysterious, undesired embedded fonts from PowerPoint file?

We need to remove some fonts that are referenced in a PowerPoint file, yet oddly don't get removed when we use the Replace Fonts command. The fonts in question don't appear anywhere that we can see visually on slides (not master slides). The font names are for fonts that long long ago we had in the pptx file but have long since stopped using. We have no use for these fonts in our pptx. And the fonts in question (e.g. "ITC Franklin Gothic Std Book") are not fonts that are shipped with Windows or MacOS.

Some users are reporting, when they open the pptx, a dialog box regarding "Install Embedded Fonts" ... "Some of the embedded fonts in your presentation cannot be installed".

Do you know how we can vanquish such traces of a font from the pptx?

We were even thinking of even using a VBA script to find where they re in the file, but we have no experience writing VBA script.

We also tried generating a PDF of the file to see if we could find the fonts in that PDF . The result of that experiment was that these mystery embedded fonts do not appear in the fonts list in the PDF... thus proving to us that the fonts are no actually being used in the slide.

bbao

hi there,

are you able to provide a screenshot showing those fonts or upload an example PowerPoint file for review?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Jamie Garroch (MVP)

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☠ MASQ ☠

Have you tried using Find/Replace in the document to search for the rogue font
(Home > Replace - dropdown "Replace Fonts") That will list all the fonts in the document even if you've just a space in that format.

Jamie Garroch (MVP)

@MASQ - that will replace fonts used by visible text but it does not reliably work for all fonts specified in the underlying XML. This has been an issue with PowerPoint ever since the file format changed from binary to XML in Office 2007.

Karen Falandays

After you have replaced fonts and checked the slide masters, in the normal view, select all slides and click the Reset Slide button

SOLUTION

Echo_S

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SOLUTION

John Korchok

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David Berman

ASKER

Thank you all. Jamie and Echo and John Korchok were spot on: we had never heard of Slidewise. It is custom made to solve this bug in PowerPoint ... loving it! I think it has 100% solved our issue. (I'll know in a few days for sure once we test with users on various operating systems!). Hey, Jamie and Echo, are there any PowerPoint addons you swear by? My favorite obscure one is Markido Engage.

Jamie Garroch (MVP)

Glad that worked for you David. Slidewise really is superb. I work for a presentation and eLearning agency called BrightCarbon and it's made a huge positive impact on the way we create PowerPoint templates and presentation. Since you ask about other add-ins, we have a free (really!) add-in for PowerPoint on Windows and macOS called BrightSlide which adds over 50 new tools to your presentation creation workflow. We also have a paid-for brand management add-in called BrandIn. I also like The Noun Project add-in which you can access from the PowerPoint ribbon via Insert / Get Add-ins. Similarly, Pexels & Pickit are found in the same place and provide access to high quality image libraries. iSpring Suite is an excellent suite of tools for converting presentations to LMS-compliant eLearning HTML5 content. And here are a few others: Build-a-Graphic for creating visuals from text, TalkTime for timing your presentation delivery, PPTMerge for mail merge and Office Timeline for project Gantt charts.

Echo_S

I don't know Markido; I'll have to check into that.

I swear by Brightslide. :-)

I also use THOR - The Hammer (pptools.com).

Will echo Jamie's recommend for The Noun Project icons. Worth every penny.

Also Slidewise, of course, and NXP (Neuxpower Lite) from the same folks to "right-size" files that are larger than they should be.

ToolsToo is also in the mix sometimes.