Cuneiform of GTFO
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About a year ago, I switched from using Calibri as my default font to using Roboto (available in variable and fixed width versions) for personal communications.
However at work, corporate branding standards oblige us to use Arial for most communications. 
At least I convinced the branding folks to adjust the official Office color palette to one that is more accessible for color-blind individuals.
I like Arial (size 10 please) and hate Calibri.
I 2nd the Lucida set of fonts. They work well together if your looking for different fonts on the same page. I’ve used Tahoma as it seems easy to read. Verdana fits that bill as well. I 'm not a fan of tight thin fonts due to my crappy eyesight. I did a quick check it looks like Palatino Linotype is a wider version of Times New Roman.
Palatino : Apple/Mac :: Times New Roman : IBM PC’s
Hmmm, not in Excel. :\
I’m gonna have to check these out
Roboto (and many others) are available for download from Google’s webfonts collection.
It looks decent, is distinctive for being subtly different than the standard fonts in Windows/Mac/Office 365, is one of the easier-to-read fonts, and is more-complete glyph-wise than many alternative fonts. (I need the full range of European, Greek, and Cyrillic characters for personal correspondence.)
The downside is that you have to embed the font in documents you send out, and Outlook displays Times New Roman if an email recipient doesn’t have it installed. But it is easy to invoke Google webfonts for other online media.
I like Garamond for text. It’s not ideal for spreadsheets, though, because it’s a serif font. But I find it comfortable to read – it’s a light font, with less black on the page, and pages printed in it just feels more spacious to me, and less crowded. Even though it actually fits more words on the page.
I’ve been mostly using Calibri in Excel, but might check out some of the ones suggested here.
SAS Monospace is the only font I like to use.
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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.
