Font problems with Office for Mac 2016 - Times New Roman

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Font problems with Office for Mac 2016 - Times New Roman

I have a MacBook Pro with Yosemite 10.10.4. I also have an Office 365 subscription and recently saw that I could upgrade to Office 2106. There was no advice visible to uninstall Office 2011 first, and in fact I worried about doing so in case the 2016 didn't work properly.

So I downloaded Office 2016, which installed itself alongside the 2011 without overwriting it. Then I saw a message to uninstall 2011, which I did.

Everything seems to work ok EXCEPT that Word documents (I don't know about Excel) no longer recognise Times New Roman fonts. It still says TNR in the font box at the top of the document, but the font on screen defaults to Calibri or some other sans serif font.

I need to use TNR for work purposes so telling me to use another one is not helpful. I had never had a problem with it in Office 2011.

In searches I've seen that other people have had the same problem with Office for Mac 2016 but none of the solutions given seem to exactly match what I see on my screen so I want to ask again. For one thing, I'm confused about the different Font folders in my Mac – I have both a Fonts and a Fonts Disabled folder in the main Library (alt-Go from Finder) with two sets of lists of Fonts, and also Fonts and Fonts Disabled folders in the Library reached from Macintosh HD with lists that are different. And in Font Book the lists are different again.

Also, Times New Roman still shows up on my computer in Font Book, as an active font, and in the Fonts Disabled folder in Macintosh HD/Library (all ttf fonts). I have seen on one site that Office for 2011 disabled certain Apple ttf fonts (including TNR) and replaced them with its own in a Microsoft fonts folder. As part of uninstalling 2011 I had to trash this folder, but Office 2016 doesn't seem to have replaced it with an equivalent version of TNR.

DOES THIS MEAN that if I do something as simple as move the Times New Roman.ttf out of the Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts Disabled folder and into the Fonts folder next to it this could restore TNR in Office 2016? I didn't want to try it without asking for any suggestions first.

As to the contradictions between the different Font folders and Font Book any suggestions would be helpful too, but for me this is a less urgent question since the other fonts, wherever they appear, seem to work.

Many thanks in advance for any orientation,

Nick Rider

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Oct 6, 2015 4:01 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

NickR London N8 Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 7, 2015 10:26 AM in response to NickR London N8

UPDATE for anyone else who has this problem and reads my initial query –

Today I contacted Microsoft Support about may main problem, i.e. not being able to read Times New Roman properly on my Mac with Word for Mac 2016. The support person did a remote connection with my Mac and uninstalled Office for Mac 2016 and then did a clean reinstall of it. When I opened a Word doc with the TNR font the same thing happened again – in the Font menu it said the document was in TNR, but it clearly didn't look like it on screen, it defaulted to a sans serif font something like Calibri.

The support person then said 'you have Times New Roman in your program sir, that is the version of TNR we have'. When I opened a web page to show her what TNR is supposed to look like and that it clearly wasn't the Font we were both seeing on screen (she still had the remote connection open) she still insisted that this is the version of TNR included by Microsoft. I said that it's not a recognisable form of TNR and Microsoft should fix it, she said she would 'escalate' my complaint, but it would be good for other people to say the same to get some response on this issue.

The obvious explanation is that TNR within Office for Mac 2016 is corrupted in some way, so no amount of fiddling with individual computers, moving fonts between folders and font book, etc will fix it. However it's probably something Microsoft could fix pretty quickly in an update if they're paying attention (...please).

Although, if Microsoft staff continue to say that there is a new Microsoft-invented TNR that looks nothing like the usual one, this won't happen!

In the meantime anyone with a Mac who like me needs to use TNR is probably best advised to remove Office 2016 and reinstall Office 2011, which is what the Microsoft person eventually suggested I do. And it works fine, and seems quicker than Office 2016 too.

I'm not addicted to TNR, it's just a default font for all sorts of organisations, so I need to see it.

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Answer 2

akacic

Level 1

9 points

Nov 16, 2015 12:22 AM in response to NickR London N8

I have tried to reset MS word for Mac 2016 several times ==> does not work.

Restart the Mac also can not help.

Then I think of Font Book in the Mac. Surprisingly, it is turned off for the TNR font set. All I did is turned on and everything comes back as normal state.

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Answer 3

wenxz

Level 1

0 points

Dec 6, 2015 11:48 PM in response to akacic

Thanks, this totally solved my problem. BTW, Arial was turned off as well when I opened Font Book.

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Answer 4

Rasama

Level 1

10 points

Feb 19, 2016 1:35 PM in response to NickR London N8

After wasting hours of time trying to fix the font issue, one thing that worked for me was switching to Times regular fonts and it worked until opening Word again. Now I noticed in this forum that TNR and Arial are turned off. Turned those back on and now my docs are APA acceptable.

I did notice dozens of additional Asian, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi fonts added after the update, that were all turned on. Some of these unnecessary fonts cannot be removed. 😟 What is MS thinking? Took way too much time removing useless fonts.

At least Times New Roman works now.

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Feb 19, 2016 4:07 PM in response to Rasama

Rasama wrote:

I did notice dozens of additional Asian, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi fonts added ... 😟 What is MS thinking?

Those are from Apple for OS X in general. Word can't even do Arabic/Farsi. You could ask Apple to make things more to your liking via

http://www.apple.com/feedback

but with foreign sales being 60% + it's not likely they would do anything to make it easier to truncate language capabilities.

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Answer 6

Oct 18, 2016 10:01 AM in response to akacic

Thank you. This worked perfect for me. My preview stopped working after installing Office 2016. But after switched 'ON' the fonts, they are working perfect.

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