change office templates company-wide

Question

Good afternoon everybody,

we are currently migrating our 400+ users to Win11 and are noticing problems with Aptos being the new default font over Calibri.

Unfortunately we have legal obligation to use Calibri in all official documents; so we need to reconfigure the users MS365 settings back to Calibri.

Now we can't just tell the users to do the reconfig by themselves and can't visit every one of them to do it for them in Outlook and Word/Excel.

Also we can't deploy modified templates Normal.dotm and NormalEmail.dotm, because that might overwrite user's individual settings.

The idea is to apply only the necessary changes directly to every user's templates (via group policy)

Another idea would be to use Registry, but i can't find appropriate settings in Windows 11.

Does someone know an editor for dotm templates that we could use ?

Regards,

Gaston

Answer 1

Hi,

According to your description, you don't want to force modify the Normal.dotm file to override the user's personal settings.

As the article said, for Word there are no direct Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to set the default font in Word (for both Microsoft 365 and 2016). It is recommended that you try to force the use of a template to see if the template can specify a font.

For Outlook, I suggest you refer to this article and try the method:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-technet-forums/41c39e1e-3d1a-4f8f-bf9c-cb41d94c4a00

Just checking in to see if the information was helpful. Please let us know if you would like further assistance.

---

If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.