After fifteen years, Microsoft is setting a new default font for Microsoft 365.

After fifteen years of Calibri, Microsoft says it’s time for something different. The new default font for Microsoft 365 is called Aptos. Users around the world will see these in the coming months.

end of an era

When a font becomes news, you know it’s a symbol somewhere. For fifteen years, every Microsoft 365 user has been accustomed to Calibri being the number one choice. A font so simple that it often just hasn’t been altered.

But with technical progress come changes that you might not think of at first. For example, higher resolution screens require a sharper and clearer font.

Two years ago, Microsoft released five new fonts: Bierstadt, Grandview, Seaford, Skeena, and Tenorite. They were added to the drop-down list and Microsoft collected user feedback for two years. It turned out that Bierstadt was preferred. To complete the change, this font is now also getting a new name at Aptos. Two years ago we described Bierstadt as “rational and precise”.

Aptos was designed by specialist Steve Matteson. He renamed Bierstadt Aptos after his favorite community in Santa Cruz, California.

Calibri c’est fini, but not quite

Aptos will now be the default font in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users, and for everyone over the coming months. Whether this will also apply to the cheaper version of Microsoft 365 for Windows 11 in the near future, which Microsoft is said to be working on, remains to be seen.

The new font is sans serif, which means there are no horizontal crosslines anywhere at the ends of the letters. If you want, you can of course continue to use Calibri, the font will not disappear from the selection list, just like the newcomers Grandview, Seaford, Skeena and Tenorite. You can also set a different font as the default in Microsoft 365 at any time if you want.

According to Microsoft, choosing a font is ultimately something personal, and that’s true. It is also an important part of text design. Anyone familiar with the online hate for Comic Sans knows what we’re talking about.