Weird Characters in Excel Online
Excel online displays fonts Arial and
Times New Roman as weird characters...
Arial font rendering issue in Excel Online
Workaround:
If you are having this issue with Excel online change the workbook font from Arial or Times to Calibri.
Background:
We noticed this issue with just 1 of our customers starting approximately a month ago (February 2023). The shared workbook is accessed by around 20 users but only 2 of the users had experienced this issue.
In our case the workbook had around 10 tabs, some of which were already in Calibri, when the user experienced this viewing a tab already in Calibri rendered the font fine, it was only the Arial tabs with the issue.
As you can see from the links below Microsoft has noted this as a global issue but to date (08/03/23) there doesn't appear to be a fix. You can follow the links below to the MS community to keep an eye on this.
What has Microsoft said:
Microsoft has acknowledged this as a global issue but there is currently no news on a direct fix. Best links to follow from the Microsoft community on this click here & here.
Other options:
Some other options, I read that changing the default font in the browser might help with this however I did this for 1 user and the problem returned the following week.
Changing from Chrome to Edge made no difference and I have also read that the problem also exists in Firefox browser. 1 of our users was working directly on his PC the other was working in a remote cloud (terminal server) environment so this does seem to be a Microsoft server-side problem.
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