Why Your PowerPoint Slides Look Different on Another Computer
Font substitution is usually the culprit, and it's fixable
By Shehryar Hassan, Microsoft 365 & Azure Consultant
You spend an hour getting a slide deck to look just right, then someone opens it on their laptop and the text has shifted, wrapped onto a new line, or spilled off the bottom of the slide. Nothing was edited. The file is the same. This trips up more people than you'd think, and it's almost always about fonts, not PowerPoint being broken.
Why this happens
PowerPoint doesn't store your fonts inside the file by default. It just stores the font name. When you open the deck on another PC, Windows looks for that font locally. If it's not installed there, it swaps in something close, usually Calibri or Arial, and that substitute takes up a different amount of horizontal space than your original font. A heading that fit on one line at 32pt in Montserrat can wrap onto two lines in Calibri, pushing everything below it down.
This is common with custom brand fonts, fonts installed from a design tool, or anything downloaded outside the standard Office set. It also shows up when you move between a Mac and a Windows machine, since font libraries differ between the two.
How to fix it
The reliable fix is to embed the fonts in the file itself. In PowerPoint, go to File, then Options, then Save. Near the bottom you'll see "Embed fonts in the file." Turn that on, and choose "Embed all characters" if other people need to edit the text, not just view it. Save the file again after turning this on, since it doesn't apply retroactively to already saved slides.
Embedding does make the file bigger, sometimes a lot bigger if you're using several font weights, so it's worth doing this only for decks that actually leave your machine, like ones going to a client or a conference room PC.
If you can't embed fonts, or the deck is already out there, stick to fonts you know are on both Windows and Mac by default: Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Times New Roman. It's not exciting, but it means what you built is what people see.
One more thing worth checking, if you're presenting from a different PC than the one you built the deck on, open it there ahead of time. A five minute check beats finding out live that your title slide doesn't fit anymore.
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