Best Fonts for Excel?

[Kurch]

For purposes of clarity and readability what fonts are considered the
best ones to use for Excel documents?

It may be necessary to distinguish between clarity on the screen vs.
clarity and readability on a printed page.

 

[Micah Chaney]

The default font should work fine. Try increasing the font size, if you
find people are having troubles

 

[Dave Peterson]

I've read that some people like Tahoma (especially for numbers).

(I use Arial and Courier New (for non-proportional) for almost all my workbooks,
though.)

 

[Nancy]

Arial is clear!

 

[Harlan Grove]

Kurch wrote...

For purposes of clarity and readability what fonts are considered the
best ones to use for Excel documents?

It may be necessary to distinguish between clarity on the screen vs.
clarity and readability on a printed page.

Numbers, text or both? Regardless, Font X may be clearer than Font Y at
the same point size, but 12 point Font Y is likely to be clearer than
10 point Font X.

This is also rather subjective and/or statistical. The clearest font
would be the one most of your intended readers/users would find
clearest. To the extent their particular preferences depart from those
of other respondents' readers/users, the responses you receive may not
be useful.

That said, IMO proportional sans serif fonts are always preferable.
Arial is OK, but avoid Arial Narrow. A true Helvetica font may be
better still, but it'll cost $$.

 

[Bill Ridgeway]

I am a bit wary about using Arial. True it is nice and clear. However the
juxtaposition of certain letters can be confusing - especially in the
smaller type sizes. As an example try the words darn and Ill.

The arguments for what makes a good font is very subjective. I suppose the
honest universal answer is whatever you think is the best one for the job.

Regards.

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions

 

[Gary Smith]

Kurch wrote...

Numbers, text or both? Regardless, Font X may be clearer than Font Y at
the same point size, but 12 point Font Y is likely to be clearer than
10 point Font X.

This is also rather subjective and/or statistical. The clearest font
would be the one most of your intended readers/users would find
clearest. To the extent their particular preferences depart from those
of other respondents' readers/users, the responses you receive may not
be useful.

That said, IMO proportional sans serif fonts are always preferable.
Arial is OK, but avoid Arial Narrow. A true Helvetica font may be
better still, but it'll cost $$.

Sometimes a mono-spaced font such as Courier New will be clearer,
especially when you have columns of text where all the cells contain the
same number of characters.

Some people prefer Tahoma to Arial, but I think Arial is clearer at small
sizes.

 

[Harlan Grove]

Sometimes a mono-spaced font such as Courier New will be clearer,
especially when you have columns of text where all the cells contain the
same number of characters.

Some people prefer Tahoma to Arial, but I think Arial is clearer at small
sizes.

This may be getting too far OT for an Excel newsgroup, but if the OP is
interested in fonts that work well in spreadsheets, then the need to use a
monospaced font to create consistent layouts from line to line doesn't
apply. If nice, neat columns are needed, then one may use as many
spreadsheet columns as one needs (subject to the 256 column limit, but IMO
no text spanning 256 or more characters per line is clear and readable no
matter what font is used).

As for monospaced fonts, I find Lucida Console clearer than any form of
Courier because of the unfortunate similarity of the numeral one and the
lower case L in Courier. Much clearer in Lucida Console since the lower case
L doesn't have a bottom serif.

 

[Murtaza]

VERDANA font is also good for spreadsheets IMO

This may be getting too far OT for an Excel newsgroup, but if the OP is
interested in fonts that work well in spreadsheets, then the need to use a
monospaced font to create consistent layouts from line to line doesn't
apply. If nice, neat columns are needed, then one may use as many
spreadsheet columns as one needs (subject to the 256 column limit, but IMO
no text spanning 256 or more characters per line is clear and readable no
matter what font is used).

As for monospaced fonts, I find Lucida Console clearer than any form of
Courier because of the unfortunate similarity of the numeral one and the
lower case L in Courier. Much clearer in Lucida Console since the lower case
L doesn't have a bottom serif.

 

[Gary Smith]

This may be getting too far OT for an Excel newsgroup, but if the OP is
interested in fonts that work well in spreadsheets, then the need to use a
monospaced font to create consistent layouts from line to line doesn't
apply. If nice, neat columns are needed, then one may use as many
spreadsheet columns as one needs (subject to the 256 column limit, but IMO
no text spanning 256 or more characters per line is clear and readable no
matter what font is used).

Sometimes a monospaced font is needed consider a column of 3-charater
language codes, centered. Example:

eng
fre
spa
ger
ita

This looks pretty ragged in a variable-pitch font such as Arial. Changing
to a fixed-pitch font improves it considerable.

As for monospaced fonts, I find Lucida Console clearer than any form of
Courier because of the unfortunate similarity of the numeral one and the
lower case L in Courier. Much clearer in Lucida Console since the lower case
L doesn't have a bottom serif.

Thanks for calling my attention to LC. I'd forgotten about it, but will
be using it move frequrently now.

 

[davegb]

Two things about fonts.
1.) People who grew up in the 50's and 60's, like me, find serif fonts
easier to read, since the books we learned to read in were written in
them (Yes, good ole Dick and Jane!). My kids generation learned to read
in sans-serif fonts, so they find those easier to read. So to some
degree, it depends on who your audience is and if they're of a specific
demographic. If not, who knows?

2.) Monospaced fonts are harder to read, though give consistent widths,
because most readers don't read each letter, they read the overall
shape of the word. Since most of the world uses kerned fonts, part of
the shape of the word is determined by the width of the letters in that
word.

I pondered this question years ago when I was working on some printing
projects, and came to the conslusion, after some research, that's it's
very difficult to make hard and fast statements about which fonts are
more readable. There are so many factors that it's really a crap shoot.
Now, I pick one I like and go with it, and hope others can manage. YMMV.