Unwanted Font in Draft View

Thank you! I've just left Word 2010 and Win7 behind for Word 2019 and Win10, and was encountering this problem for the first time (and only intermittently).

For what it's worth, I went through (and documented) lots of the Word settings a couple weeks ago when I was setting up Word 2019, and I definitely left that checkbox unchecked. But when I checked that setting just now while one of my documents was doing the draft-view-Courier thing, the box was checked, and unchecking it did the trick.

Thanks for this advice, Allen. Had the same issue. Wouldn't have thought to look for the solution where you suggested. Regards from Poland.

Thanks a bunch for solving this otherwise insoluble issue for me! You're a lifesaver!

Allen, thanks very much. This is not the first time an article of yours has helped me address a hard-to-identify Office issue, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

But I don't do that, I just run those two macros. Or rather, one macro, this one:

Sub styleview_wrap()
'
' styleview_wrap Macro
'
Application.DisplayStatusBar = True
With ActiveWindow
.DisplayHorizontalScrollBar = False
.DisplayVerticalScrollBar = True
.StyleAreaWidth = InchesToPoints(2)
.DisplayScreenTips = True
With .View
.ShowAnimation = True
.Draft = True
.WrapToWindow = True
.ShowPicturePlaceHolders = False
.ShowFieldCodes = False
.ShowBookmarks = False
.FieldShading = wdFieldShadingAlways
.ShowTabs = False
.ShowSpaces = False
.ShowParagraphs = False
.ShowHyphens = False
.ShowHiddenText = False
.ShowAll = False
.ShowHighlight = True
End With
End With
End Sub

I knew this, but I am finding that when I run a macro to both show the style area and wrap text to the window, the box somehow gets re-checked and my (multiple) fonts all go back to one font, Courier.

Be aware that if you work in draft view and by mistake choose the open document from your list of recently used documents (perhaps because you are looking to open a different document in that list) and click to open it Word will always automatically toggle this switch to show the draft font whether you like it or not.

Only the steps in the action above will cure the problem - unless and until you try and open a document twice once more!

This seems to be a bug that Microsoft have just not picked up on and is of long standing - I have experienced it in Word 2010, Word 2013 and now in Word 2016 (and on different machines).

I had a similar problem in full screen reading view in Word 2010. It only seemed to affect documents that contained the font New Century Schoolbook. I read somewhere that Truetype fonts could cause this problem, so I switched to Opentype fonts, and have not had the problem since.

Wow. That fixed it. Thanks! I spent a couple hours trying to fix this. I couldn't hone in on the solution using Google. Only found pages on how to enable draft view and such. Then on a whim, I added "courier" to the search because I noticed that the font I was seeing looked an awful lot like Courier. That led me here.

What caused the problem in the first place is that I had a Word doc open in draft view and didn't realize it was already open. I then clicked a shortcut file to open that same document. Then suddenly, that document switched to Courier font and I couldn't change it. At first, I didn't realize it was only draft view that was screwy. I thought I corrupted the template or my styles somehow by opening a file ontop of itself.

Thanks again!
Kyle

You solved my problems, as usual. Thank you Allen!

I agree with Dr. Bartolo.

I use Word 2010, and the comment: "Word treats Draft view as a minimalistic approach to Word, one in which fonts aren't normally that big of a deal" is not quite true. On the contrary, fonts are a big deal in all media!

All fonts displayed on computer monitors need to be sans serif fonts because even with high resolution monitors, serif fonts do not appear sharp enough for the human eye to effectively resolve. This is troublesome for Kathleen because she indicates that here vision is not 100 percent. In my response to her, I suggested she try using the Calibri font in place of the Arial font. The Arial font is very dated and Calibri was designed by Microsoft as a Clear Type font, very suitable for online viewing. The more control we have over font choice, the better.

- Lee Batchelor
Technical Writer, Technical Writing Instructor and Course Designer (Humber College, Toronto)

In Office 2013 Microsoft seem to have taken the minimalist approach to an extreme - one I personally do not welcome. So, for example, a footnote that prints out as a raised, smaller character now, confusingly, appears in draft view as a normal character and not raised at all. It looks fine in print layout view

Considering that it is not that long ago that Microsoft called the draft view "normal view", it is odd that they have made this sort of change. The draft view has many advantages over print layout, and it is a shame to see Microsoft relegating draft view more and more.