Hey FontFace!

It's 1977. I'm fourteen. At a church dance. With girls.

They've played Dream On by Aerosmith (oddly appropriate) and I was too scared to move. Frampton Shows Me The Way, but who to ask? Then it happened. Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven spins up and a girl asks me to dance! An older girl. To a slow song. 14 year old nirvana! Then, disaster! The darn song speeds up in the middle and we have to let go and fast dance! What do I do with my arms? And my legs? Oh my gosh, my legs!

And now you know how I feel when you use a mishmash of fonts. Confused. Just pick one and use it.

Scenario: One Bar Chart, One Tab

Question: How many places can you change the font?

Answer: Only counting the buttons that say 'Font', I count ELEVEN! Even more if you consider things like Expression Attributes.

Result: A plethora of ways to crap-up* your interface on even the simplest dashboard.

Let's go through them one by one.

Tabrow Properties

Right click on the Tabrow, click the Tabrow Properties, and bam, you get a font dialog box.

Title Settings

Title Settings allow you to format the Title in Chart. You can change the look, alignment, color and font.

Print Settings

OK, this one is cheating a bit because you don't see its effects in the interface, but it can crap-up* anything that gets printed.

Animate...

Another trick, because you are too smart to make an animated chart. But still another place to change the font.

Legend

Another one hidden a layer down.

Text in Chart

 I rarely build a chart that doesn't include some text to give context.

Axes

You can change the font on both axes. Separately. But don't.

Font

I feel a little weird pointing this out...

Caption

Even the Caption can be a different font.

Finally...

Even though absolutes are always wrong (see what I did there?), everybody confuses fonts and typefaces. Stealing from Jon Tangerine... a typeface is a family and a font is a member of that family. So, if my family name was 'Verdana' and my first name was 'Bold, 12pt, Red', then the typeface is Verdana and the font is Bold, 12pt, Red Verdana.

So, smartypants, next time someone tells you to use the Verdana font, you can tell them to pound sand because Verdana is a typeface.

Epilog

The 80s were so much easier. Crank the Sex Pistols or Dead Kennedys until your ears bleed, let the posers slam dance in the middle, circle, strike, repeat. You'll heal, poser. Eventually.

*Crap-up - Technical term meaning "make DJ Mikey Fresh very angry".