Favorite professional fonts

I don’t really have a preference, but I’d like to register a complaint. I freaking HATE it when someone sends me a spreadsheet that’s been cobbled together from nine data sources and they managed to pull in three different fonts, and 98% of it’s 11 point but every so often there is a number in 10 point. You’re killing me here, just take 38 seconds and format it up a bit.

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I used to do Verdana or Arial, but work defauls to Calibri and I’m OK with it. Tahoma is OK as well, but not my usual go-to.

Garamond was (still is?) the official font for Liberty Mutual. Always looked weird to me, I never got used to it.

Or, worse yet, 12 pt, 9 pt and 8 pt. All mixed in haphazardly.

What is this, a ransom note you made in Excel?

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Not me. I format all my sheets with appropriate and consistent font sizes.

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I think it’s hilarious that one of the ways a recent data fraud was caught was that data that had been duplicated and slightly altered was in a slightly different font

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Source? Because that’s freaking funny.

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I referenced it in my recent article here:

The most hilarious “tell” was that two different default Excel fonts were used in the files; half the data used Calibri (the default sans serif font in Microsoft Office applications, and usually the default font in Excel), and half the data used Cambria (the default serifed font). It seems like the original data were in Calibri, somebody copied the data over and then used a PRNG to add to those numbers to try to hide the falsification, and somehow switched the font while doing so. Perhaps they had switched the font so whoever doing the falsifying could eyeball the original versus the copies.

But my original source is this:

scroll down to the discussion of Cambria vs Calibri. There’s all sorts of insane laziness in faking that data in that story, especially given what the subject matter of the research was.

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That is hilarious.

I find that fonts sometimes change if you paste blocks of stuff back and forth between different spreadsheets that have different default settings. (Themes? Whatever, it’s a nuisance for me to clean up.) My guess is that’s what happened, and it wasn’t intentional at any point. But it’s freaking hilarious that they didn’t notice, and clean that up.

:bump:

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Calibri is for psychopaths, Arial or nothing.

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But it’s the excel default!

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Defaults can be changed.

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arial looks like my middle school girl classmate’s handwritings

I feel like if I change the default font though I’ve gotta go my own way and Arial feels too well trodden…

We use Century Gothic as the default at my company.

I suggested Wingdings 2, but nobody seconded my motion.

What’s the point in fonts like Wingdings 2?

it’s fun!

make tools.

I know that “a” is a checkmark. Great for checking off things

To show that 9/11 was an inside job

image

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