View all installed fonts with Microsoft Word

It’s easy to preview fonts one by one in most applications, but what if you need to compare several fonts to pick one for a presentation of a blog design? Earlier this month, Lifehacker presented the application WinFontsView that displays all the fonts on your system on one screen, making the choice easier. Reading about it I remembered another solution that doesn’t involve a separate program: if you use Microsoft Word, a short macro can do the same job.

Simply open the Visual Basic Editor (the easiest way is to use a keyboard shortcut, Alt+F11, which works with both the classic and the new ribbon interface), insert a new module and then paste the Visual Basic code below:

Public Sub Display_Fonts()     
Dim Kracter As Variant, fnr As Integer      
' prevent screen from updating during macro run      
Application.ScreenUpdating = False      
fnr = 0      
For Each Kracter In FontNames      
  With Selection      
   fnr = fnr + 1 ' select next font      
   ' write font name in document      
   .Font.Name = "Times New Roman"      
   .Font.Bold = True      
   .Font.Underline = wdUnderlineSingle      
   .TypeText fnr & ". " & Kracter      
   .InsertParagraphAfter      
   .MoveDown unit:=wdParagraph      
   Count = 1      
   Extend = wdMove      
   ' write test characters with selected font      
   .Font.Bold = False      
   .Font.Underline = wdUnderlineNone      
   .Font.Name = Kracter      
   .TypeText "qwertyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnm aîstâ ßüöä"      
   .InsertParagraphAfter      
   .MoveDown unit:=wdParagraph      
   Count = 1      
   Extend = wdMove      
   ' second test paragraph      
   .TypeText "1234567890`-=\[];',./~!@#$%^&*()_+|{}:<>?"      
   .InsertParagraphAfter      
   .MoveDown unit:=wdParagraph      
   Count = 2      
   Extend = wdMove      
  End With      
Next Kracter      
MsgBox "You have " & fnr & " fonts installed on your computer."      
Application.ScreenUpdating = True      
End Sub

You can always change the text in quotes after the .TypeText command if you want to compare a specific set of words or characters in different typefaces. Run the macro from the Visual Basic Window with F5 or in the Word document with Alt+F8 and the pages will fill with text in different fonts, like in the image below:

If Word refuses to run the code and pops up a message that the macros in the project are disabled, you need to change the macro security settings to “Medium” (e.g. in Word 2003 go to Tools ► Macro ► Security…). After version 2000, the default setting is “High”, which disables all untrusted macros and doesn’t even allow you to run code you’ve written yourself unless you sign it. With “Medium” however the user gets prompted every time the file is opened and can disable macros in third-party Word files to prevent potentially malicious code from running.