Fonts Missing in Word

Graham has Office installed on his computer. When he tries to access the Fonts drop-down list in Word, PowerPoint and Publisher, all he gets is a Device font, but in Excel he has access to all the fonts installed on the system. Graham is wondering why this is occurring.

In order to understand what is going on, it is important to understand what Word expects from its environment. One of the things that Word expects (as does PowerPoint and Publisher) is a printer that it can work with. If the printer is installed correctly in Windows, then Word will use it and format everything you see on-screen as if it will be printed on that printer.

If you don't have a printer driver installed—or if you don't have a printer driver installed that can use your fonts—then Word can't access the fonts, either. Excel can because it doesn't really care that much about printer capabilities. Whether a given font can be used by a given printer is of little consequence to Excel, but it means quite a bit to Word.

So, the first thing you need to do is check with Windows to see which printer drivers you have installed. If you don't have any installed, then install at least one, even if it is for a printer you don't have. If you have the correct printer drivers installed, make sure that one of those printers is specified as the default printer in Windows. Restart Word and your fonts should now be available.

If you have a laptop computer that you normally don't print from, you should still install a printer driver on it and make sure that printer driver is set as default. If you don't, you won't be able to use the full formatting features of Word.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12866) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Fonts Missing in Word.