Font Use for Internal Documents

If your office is anything like mine, your employees use both PC’s and Macs.  Non web-based correspondence has no font choices beyond that on the user’s computer.  For internal documents and stationary, use fonts that come across the way you think they will in internal communications. 

Obviously, there are many ways to distribute fonts for internal use (For instance, the font Meta came installed on any new computer at several corporations I’ve worked at, as it was the preferred font for that brands’s correspondance)  But for a no-nonsense quick and easy solution, you should target the fonts you expect to already be installed on the user’s side.  Remember that not all internal memos stay internal, so you’ll need to think about font popularity outside your company as well as in.  When looking to modernize your stationary, be sure that font issues won’t cause problems with layout or other discrepancies between what you think is being seen and what’s actually showing at your client’s door. 

WIth that in mind, I present a quick list of the installed fonts you can expect, given the current OS usage and the fonts associated with each.  Below are the top 10 fonts (the 11th & 12th, Arial Narrow and Century Gothic, were noticeably behind in usage)

Font - Percentage of computers with fonts installed*

1. Verdana - 99.55%*
2. Times/New Roman - 99.33%*
3. Arial - 99.18%*
4. Trebuchet - 98.95%*
5. Lucida - 98.87%*
6. Georgia - 98.75%*
7. Impact - 98.29%*
8. Arial Black - 98.11%*
9. Tahoma - 98.00%*
10. Palatino - 96.95%*

*Percentages of Mac vs PC usage were determined using statistics from AT Internet Institute,
Clicky Web Analytic, Net Market Share, Global Stats, StatOwl, W3Counter, Webmasterpro &l; Wikimedia, against percentages of use per OS listed extensively below. 

Full stats for Mac and PC below

notes above taken from here, additional statistics from Mircosoft, Microsoft 2.