"Outline" fonts

[Guest]

MS Word allows you to format a font, for example Arial as an "Outline" which
looks like an outline of each letter. How can I do this in Excel?

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
AFAIK Excel does not support this

 

[CarlosAntenna]

This would be possible if you have an outline style font installed on your
pc. I have one called Swis721 BdOul BT that is just the outline of the
letters, but you can't set this attribute for just any font.

Carlos

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Since I never use outline fonts in my cross-platform work, I was
surprised at your statement - MacXL has the Outline option built in to
Format/Cell/Font...

Sure enough, XL03 doesn't.

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi JE
I just re-checked (you got me wondering at least...) but excel 2003 has
no 'Outline' option in the format cell dialog.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

The good news is that outline survives a round trip from MacXL to XL03
and back. So XL03 preserves the setting...

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi JE
fortunately this is only a minor discrepancy between the two versions.
but I would assume that any VBA code who sets this would cause a
compile error in Excel 2003

Frank

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Actually, no. I ran this macro on a workbook in XL03:

Sub Outline()
Selection.Font.OutlineFont = True
End Sub

and the when I opened the workbook in XL04, the selection showed up as
an outline font. So you can *set* the property in WinXL, you just can't
see it.

From XL04 Help:

OutlineFont Property

True if the font is an outline font. Read/write Boolean.

This property has no effect in Windows, but its value is retained (it can be
set and returned).

Surprisingly (at least to me), the property doesn't even show up in the
property list in XL03/VBA Help, though it is listed in the Object
Browser.

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi JE
the 'mysteries' of Excel again
thanks for checking!

Frank

 

[Dave Peterson]

From xl2002 VBA's help for outlinefont:

Remarks
This property has no effect in Windows, but its value is retained (it can be set
and returned).