Font Manager for PowerPointAn add-in, from Stoatworks Labs ·

Which fonts does this deck actually use, and which of them are missing on the machine that is about to present it? This add-in answers that inside PowerPoint — no upload, no drag-and-drop — and offers the missing ones as real downloads, metric-compatible substitutes, or a sidecar bundle to carry with the file.

It is the same scanner as the PowerPoint Font Manager web tool, run on the open presentation instead of a file you drop in. It ignores the thirty-odd script-fallback fonts every Office theme names whether or not a single such character appears, and it resolves face names — “Helvetica Neue Medium”, “Poppins Regular” — to the families they belong to before it calls anything missing.

Download for Mac Download for Windows

A small installer that adds the add-in to PowerPoint for your account, with no admin password. The add-in itself runs from this site, so it keeps itself up to date. PowerPoint on the web: manifest.xml. Source and issues on GitHub · Project page

Where it has been proven

Verified end to end in PowerPoint for Mac (16.112): the installer and uninstaller, reading the open deck, scanning it, checking installed fonts, and saving a fetched font through the native Save dialog. The Windows installer, PowerPoint for Windows and PowerPoint on the web haven't been tested yet. If you try any of them, say how it went.

Install

PowerPoint for Mac

  1. Open Font-Manager-for-PowerPoint.pkg. It's signed and notarised, installs for your account only (no admin password), and asks to quit PowerPoint if it's open. PowerPoint has to have been opened at least once on this Mac.
  2. When macOS asks whether Installer may access data from other apps, choose Allow. That's the installer reaching PowerPoint's add-ins folder, which lives inside PowerPoint's own storage. The uninstaller asks the same.
  3. Open PowerPoint and a deck, then Home ▸ Add-ins ▸ Developer Add-ins ▸ Font Manager. That also puts a Font Manager button on the Home tab until PowerPoint quits; next time, start from Home ▸ Add-ins again.
  4. To remove it, open Uninstall-Font-Manager-for-PowerPoint.pkg.

PowerPoint for Windows

  1. Close PowerPoint and run Font-Manager-for-PowerPoint-Setup.exe. It installs for your account only, with no administrator prompt. It isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen will say it doesn't recognise it: More info ▸ Run anyway.
  2. Open PowerPoint and a deck. Font Manager has a button on the Home tab; if it isn't there, choose Home ▸ Add-ins and pick it from your add-ins.
  3. To remove it, uninstall Font Manager for PowerPoint from Settings ▸ Apps ▸ Installed apps.

PowerPoint on the web

  1. Download manifest.xml.
  2. Home ▸ Add-ins ▸ More Add-ins (or Insert ▸ Add-ins), then My Add-ins ▸ Upload My Add-in, and pick it. The pane opens from the Home tab. The same works in Microsoft 365 on Windows if you'd rather not run an installer.

All the installers do is put manifest.xml where PowerPoint looks for add-ins: on a Mac, ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Documents/wef/; on Windows, a registry value under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef\Developer. Doing it by hand works just as well.

What it does, and does not, do

Reads the deck in place

PowerPoint hands the add-in the open presentation's bytes directly (getFileAsync). Nothing is uploaded anywhere. A large deck takes a few seconds — it is PowerPoint serialising the file, not a network round trip.

Checks what is installed here

Office exposes no installed-font list, so the check is the same canvas width-probe the web tool uses: accurate for is this family present. On Windows a font installed after PowerPoint launched reads as missing until PowerPoint is reopened; the pane says so.

Fetches the missing ones

Real files from Google Fonts and Fontsource where a licence allows; metric-compatible stand-ins for Calibri, Cambria, Arial and friends; Adobe Fonts named and linked, never faked. Downloads arrive through PowerPoint's own Save dialog.

Never installs anything

An add-in is a webview and cannot write to your Fonts folder. It gives you the files; installing is a double-click. The desktop build of the web tool is the one that installs outright.

Open source under the MIT licence. The scanner is vendored from pptx-font-manager and imported unchanged, so the two tools cannot disagree about a deck.