The Adobe Creative Cloud font library is vast, with a much larger offering of font options than Microsoft provides. The question is, can an Adobe Creative Cloud font be used in a PowerPoint presentation?
The quick answer is “yes”, but there are some gotchas to know about. The first gotcha is that to use Adobe fonts (anywhere) an Adobe Creative Cloud account is needed. Once you have signed up for the Adobe CC service, download and install the Adobe Creative Cloud app from the website. Then login using your credentials. To find fonts, you can use the Adobe Creative Cloud app. From the menu on the CC homepage, click the “f” icon to navigate to Adobe Fonts:
Once here, you can see the Adobe fonts you have added to your CC account or have installed on your computer. “Added Fonts” are all fonts you have simply added to your CC account. “Installed Fonts” are fonts you’ve added AND installed on your computer (this is an important distinction).
To find more fonts to use, you can browse fonts via the Adobe Fonts website by clicking on the “BROWSE MORE FONTS” button:
You can find all fonts in the Adobe library here. Filter fonts by tags like “calligraphic”, “clean”, “rounded”, along with serif, sans serif and other properties.
Once you find a font you’d like to use, click “ADD FAMILY”. This will add the font to your CC account:
You’ll be prompted to open the CC app back up. Then you can find the font(s) that you’ve added there. And here is the second gotcha: you can’t use the new fonts in PowerPoint until you click “install family”. This will allow you to not only use the font in PowerPoint, but across other apps on your computer!
The computer now has the installed Adobe fonts available to ALL apps, including PowerPoint! However, you’ll need to restart PowerPoint for the fonts to be recognized.
On the list of gotchas – PowerPoint does not have a warning when fonts are used in a presentation but not installed on that computer. So, knowing an Adobe font is needed, is not obvious when a presentation is opened.
And one final gotcha: anyone wanting to view or edit a presentation using an Adobe font must have an Adobe CC account and install the font on their computer through that CC account. For designers and some corporate users this won’t be much of an issue. This is because the Adobe CC suite is widely in use by this group (just remember to install the Adobe CC font). However, for many corporate users, using a presentation with Adobe CC fonts will be an issue if they do not have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
-Jake @ TLC