By Jin Nan Goto

The new Ribbon interface and the new Office filetypes are the most notable changes that Microsoft Office 2007 brought, but one minor change was a new default font.  In Microsoft Word 2007 11 point Calibri is the new default font as opposed to 12 point Times New Roman which was the previous default fonts.  Here is how you can change the default font back to Times New Roman or to whatever font that you like.

There are several reasons why you would want to change the default fonts other than nostalgia. You may have older computers still running older versions of Office and you would like to have the fonts consistent on them. You may want to choose a smaller font to save paper when printing, or if you print a lot of documents you can choose a font that is really easy to read.

Here’s how to do it

• On the Home tab, click on the “Expand Styles” icon in the lower right of the styles menu.
• Click on the “Manage Styles” button at the bottom of the menu that expands.  (see figure below)

• Next you need to select the “Set Defaults” tab.
• Choose the new font, font size, and any other options (like font color)
• At the bottom of this menu there two radio buttons that you can choose from.  If you select “Only on this document” the new font will only apply to the current document.  If you choose “New documents based on this template” the new font will apply to all new documents.

The first time I ran Microsoft Office 2007 I experienced somewhat of a shock.  “Where the heck was everything”.  While innovative; the ribbon menu of Office 2007 was a dramatic change from the menu system of prior versions of Office.  I suddenly have to relearn how to do simple things such as print the document.  I really missed the icons on the toolbar that allowed me to do common tasks with the click of a mouse.  You can do this in Office 2007, but you will need to do some configuration.  The steps I’m showing are for Word 2007 but Excel and PowerPoint have similar steps.

Step 1. Open Word Options

First you need to click on the “Microsoft Office Button” (The Microsoft Office logo that is actually a button) and select “Word Options”.  Because it is detached from the rest of the menu, many users overlook the Word Options button.  However Word Options is very useful.

Step 2.  Choose Customize

The next step is rather easy you simply choose Customize in the menu.  From this menu you can access many useful settings for office.  For example, If you choose Save in the menu you can change the default format to save files from docx to Word 97-2003 files.  If you select Proofing you can change the settings for the Spelling and Grammar Checker.

Step 3. Customize you Quick Access Toolbar

You can select items from among the various commands and add them to your Quick Access Toolbar using the Add button.  You can add <Separator>(s) for organization and printing is once again a mouse click away.