Microsoft’s introduction of cloud fonts was a huge step forward in finally moving beyond Arial and Calibri and bringing more elegant typography to Office and especially PowerPoint. Users can now make use of fonts like Avenir, Gill Sans Nova, Source Sans Pro and Neue Haas Grotesk.
But, of course, the implementation was not ideal. Users not on O365 or PowerPoint 2019 can’t make use of these fonts and will not have them when sent a file designed with them. (You can embed cloud fonts, however, which might be the safest route when using them.) And Microsoft provides no indication of whether a file is making use of cloud fonts. Also, once you download and begin using a cloud font, the little cloud icon disappears, and you no longer know which fonts in the dropdown are cloud, system or local fonts.
Here’s a tiny bit of help:
Microsoft provides an up to date list of cloud fonts here. And the list is slowly being added to (although Microsoft to date has provided no pushed information to users when the list changes as it did late last year.)
The forever awesome Julie Terberg has an excellent rundown of cloud fonts along with a visual guide.
And if you ever want to “reset” your cloud font downloads to see all those little cloud icons again, you can do so by deleting the cloud font files here:
- PC: c:\Users\[name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FontCache\4\CloudFonts
- Mac: Users\[name]\library\group_containers\UBF8T346G9.Office\FontCache\4\CloudFonts
