Large Screen Fonts After Installing PowerPoint for Windows

 Last reviewed: August 24, 1995
Article ID: Q76848
The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Excel for Windows, versions 2.x, 3.0, 4.0

SUMMARY

After installing PowerPoint for Windows, the screen font used by Excel and other applications for menus, dialogs, and so on may become extremely large. For example, the screen font that is used by Excel for the formula bar, status bar, and so on will be changed to a font so large that not all messages, options, or dialog boxes will be legible.

MORE INFORMATION

This behavior occurs when the screen fonts that were originally being used on your system are the wrong resolution for the video driver currently installed. For example, you may be using regular VGA screen fonts while you have a high-resolution or 8514/A video driver installed. This situation may occur if your system was originally set up for standard VGA, and then you later installed a high-resolution driver without installing the appropriate high-resolution fonts for it.

Solution

If you have this problem, install the appropriate set of screen fonts from the original Windows disks, as follows:

  1. From the Control Panel, select Fonts.

  2. Choose the Add button.

  3. Select the appropriate font file(s).

You can also achieve this task without using the Windows Control Panel, as follows:

  1. Use the EXPAND.EXE utility to decompress and copy the appropriate font files from the Windows Setup disks to the WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory.

  2. Modify the [fonts] section of the WIN.INI file to point to the location of those new font files.

When an application requests a font for display, a font is provided by Windows from the list of available screen fonts in the WIN.INI file. Preference is given to those fonts that match the screen resolution of the video driver installed. If you have installed Windows for the VGA video driver, Excel requests Helv 10 pt for use in the formula bar and the status bar uses the font closest to Helv 10 (VGA Res). This font is included in the file HELVE.FON. If that font is not installed, the system will attempt to pick an appropriate substitute, choosing from fonts with the correct resolution first.

When you install PowerPoint for Windows, you may also install the large screen fonts that come with it. PowerPoint for Windows will install the set of large fonts that are appropriate for the video driver being used by Windows. One of the fonts that will be installed is Helv 36 point. If no other Helv screen font of the appropriate resolution is currently on the system, Windows will choose Helv 36 as the best substitute, resulting in the large text under the icons in Program Manager.

REFERENCES

"Microsoft Windows User's Guide," version 3.0, pages 177-180

KBCategory: kbusage
KBSubcategory:

Additional reference words: 2.10 3.00 4.00 winppt macppt

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Last reviewed: August 24, 1995
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