How to change the default font and size in Word

I used to have a routine whenever I would open Word and create a new document. I would always start by changing the font to one that I like, and also the font size. What a waste of time!

The default font in Word, if you don’t change anything, is Calibri. The font size is 11. It looks like this:

It’s not a bad font. Pretty clear and easy to read. But what if you want all of your documents to be in Times New Roman, size 14?

It’s also a nice font, very classic style. You could type your whole document in the default Calibri 11, and then highlight the entire thing and change it to Times New Roman 14. But that only fixes the document you’re working on right now. Using that strategy, you have to go through that process every single time.

There’s a better way! You can just change Word to automatically default to the font and size you want to use, every time.

Here’s how to change the default font and font size in MS Word:

First, open a new, blank Word document.

Up in the toolbar at the top, find the section labeled “Font”, and click on that little arrow in the lower right corner of that section:

That opens up the font dialogue box. You’ll see three columns – this is where you choose the font itself, the font style (regular, italic, bold) and the size. You can see I’ve chosen Times New Roman, regular, size 14:

And the final step is to just click the “Set as Default” button in the lower left corner:

Oops, one more step – you need to tell Word if you want this to be the default font for just THIS document, or for all future documents:

If you choose for it to be all documents, click OK and close Word. Then open a new blank document, and you should see that it’s already in your chosen default font and size. Easy!