The fonts that you use are obviously going to be very important to you. If you choose something that looks very professional when you’re trying to make a personal document it could look a bit too business-like and therefore not have the same effect (for example if you were creating a birthday card), whereas using a font that is very exotic for a business document look very unprofessional and really isn’t a good idea at all. In this article, we’re going to be telling you about the default fonts used and how you can change the defaults.
The first thing we want to tell you about is how you can change the defaults. You’re going to need to load it up on your computer and go into the Writer tool, then go into Tools –> Options. In the “Writer” tab, you’ll see a sub tab called “Basic Fonts (Western)” which is where you can set the default you want to use for many types of text areas, including the default text, headings, lists, captions and indexes. You’ll find a drop down box for each of these so you can set it to whatever you want.
If you look at the list, you’ll find that most of them are set to “Times New Roman”. You’ll find this in a lot of areas, these days this font is used in most areas and not just in this program. The reason for this is simple – it’s an easy to recognise font that everyone can read without problems. It looks professional and yet it can still be used in personal documents, although some might say that it’s actually quite predictable and this could be a reason why you want to change it. Arial is used in headings because of it’s bold nature, it makes them stand out much more clearly which can really help to get the message across when people use and read your documents.
Now in most cases we’d recommend keeping these default fonts as they’ll be the ones that you use the most. You should only change these options if you really do change the font a lot – we find that these defaults have been set for a reason, these are the fonts that most users prefer to use in their documents. One font we love is Calibri so you could change your default font to this if you wanted to, but other than that we don’t really feel the need to use these options. It gives you the ability to do so just in case you need to though so the flexibility is in your hands.
In conclusion, changing the default fonts that are used is something that anyone can do, it just involves loading up the office suite and then going into the options panel. You can change them to any fonts you have installed which gives you great flexibility when you’re creating documents and reports, although the defaults will probably be perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. If you want to take full control of what you produce and use whether that be for personal or business purposes, then we recommend that you get involved with this feature as well as installing Open Office to your computer to enjoy the many benefits that it brings to its users.