Removing ClearType From Office 2007

I was upgraded to Office 2007 at work yesterday. My cubical neighbor (Hi, Jim) has had it for a few weeks and has done nothing but complain. I have to admit I am not in love with the new interface, it does look like it might be helpful to novices and today’s big button/colorful icon lovers, but I’m old school and like the drop down menu thing better. I quickly figured out how to hide the Ribbon and add my wanted buttons to the top menu, so I can deal with the changes.

Office 2007 turns on Microsoft’s ClearType automatically which they have designed to make text look crisper on LCD screens by blurring the edges. Some people love this “advancement”, most don’t even notice and another faction hates it. I thought I fell only in the hate column because at work and home when I have run into Clear Type in the past the first I did was to disable it. To me the slight blurring of the characters, just makes them look out of focus.

Off to the web to see about shutting off the Blurr Type in Office 2007. Before you jump in to let me know Microsoft has Control Panel App for tuning ClearType, I tried it and it didn’t help.

Depending on which version of Windows you have there are different ways to turn off ClearType. For XP you have to:
1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.
2. On the Appearance tab, click Effects.
3. Click to select the Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box, and then click Normal in the list. This turns it off for a lot of things, but Office 2007 still uses it.

To shut it off in Office you need to follow these instructions:
1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click program Options.
2. Click Popular.
3. Under Top options in working with program, click to clear the Always use ClearType check box.
4. Click OK to close the program Options dialog box.
5. Restart the 2007 Office program. This is all well and good, but Outlook is still holding out!

To bring Outlook into line you need to go to View -> Current View -> Customize Current View -> 1) Other Settings Button – Change the 3 fonts, Column, Row, Auto Preview & 2) Automatic Formatting Button – Change all 5 rules. Then go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format Tab -> Signatures Button – Change the font if needed. Then select the Personal Stationary Tab – Change the three fonts there. I changed them all to Tahoma and left the point size alone. Arial would work pretty well here too.

After all that, the documents now use the crisp sharp fonts I know and love, but guess what, all the menu text in Office 2007 still looks fuzzy. Turns out Microsoft commissioned some new ClearType friendly fonts to be use in the Office interface. Bastards!

There may be a different way to cure this issue, but I opted for the brute force method, my Google searching turned up a site that listed those fonts and I moved them and all their variations from the windows font directory: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Segoeui.