Fixing "Everything I Type Is In Times New Roman" in Word 2016

• Updates
  • 2018-12-14: Section "Problem Reappearing"
  • 2019-04-23: Section "Problem Reappearing (Again)"
  • 2020-12-27: Section "Further Approaches"
  • 2022-05-31: Yet another link to a potential solution in "Further Approaches"

I had a very stupid issue with Word 2016 on my office computer and this my story about the journey to solve it which took me a couple of months. Spoiler: it re-appeared and could not be fixed for good.

When I opened any given docx file in my Word (Office Professional Plus 2016) and I started to type within an existing paragraph which is set in - let's say Arial font, I end up with my characters set in Times New Roman.

When I am started a new dotx file, everything I was typing was in Times New Roman instead of the pre-defined font.

On further investigation, I found out that size and font color was used correctly from the given document/template/formatting but the font itself was Times New Roman (TNR) all the time. So when I typed in an word set in Arial 12pt, I got TMR 12pt for my newly typed characters. When I typed in a blue heading 1 which was set in Georgia 14pt, I ended up with having blue TMR 14pt heading 1.

Placing my cursor in the document in an paragraph correctly showed me that it is based on "Normal" template (or whatever template element it was set in). This holds true for the original characters and for the characters I inserted. When I selected the text of my changes and clicked on the format template "Normal" (or whatever template element that was appropriate), everything was corrected, ending up with the correct fonts.

So this was not an issue of not having a working Arial or Georgia font installed.

This was driving me nuts. Anything I was typing, I had to select and format manually.

Doing the usual research with web search engines, I found that this issue is not really a know one. I could hardly find anything related in the big web. This was my best source for information in the end.

I started a reddit thread and a Microsoft answers thread. The latter gave me some input but none of them fixed my issue.

And before you recognize yourself: yes, I did not post the solution below to the Microsoft thread simply because after logging in, all "reply" buttons are disabled for me. The happiness is, when it's not a web forum.

Here is the long list of things I did which did not fix my issue:

• Re-installing Office 2016 Pro
• Deleting C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Normal.dotm
• Disabling all Word Add-ins
• Updating the printer driver for default printer
• Setting the default printer to "Microsoft print to PDF"
• Closing all other applications and shutting down all manually installed services in the background
• Repairing MS Office via the setup routine
• Starting Word in Safe Mode (via holding CTRL key and clicking on application icon while still holding CTRL key)
• Deleting the registry tree for HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/16.0/Word
• Changing the default language to "English US" in Office Language Preferences
• Reset the Windows 10 default language (Settings → Time and Language → Region & language) to "English US"

Starting Word as a different user did solve the issue but was no permanent solution for obvious reasons.

The only thing that fixed the issue for my current user was to get a copy of a working "Normal.dotm" file from a colleague who does not face the same issue. After replacing my own copy with his, it suddenly worked.

Please notice that I let Word re-create the "Normal.dotm" by removing the file alltogether multiple times without any change of the issue.

I am really disappointed and frustrated because of this issue. So I wrote this blog post to help peers who suffer from this issue. Additionally, it will serve well for anybody arguing that closed source software has good quality and I get support for it in real-life scenarios like this.

Unfortunately, the problem re-appeared and replacing "Normal.dotm" and even "NormalEmail.dotm" did not resolve the issue.

So I tried another approach which helped in this instance. I removed the "Normal.dotm" and even "NormalEmail.dotm" files. Then I started "Office 2016 Language Preferences" using Windows-key and typing in its name. There, I switched the default editing language from "English (United Kingdom)" (the one I should use) to "English (United States)".

After restarting Office (including Outlook!), the issue disappeared (again).

Let's hope for the best that with my wrong language preference settings, I may use the document's default font instead of hard-coded TNR.

Very professional, Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the issue re-appeared again. No fix that had worked before is solving the issue. I just give up. Whenever I need working on a Word document, I'll find myself a free computer with a different Word installation.

Professional Software my ass.

I'm no longer using that machine and therefore I'm no longer affected by this bug. You can still send me approaches for fixing the issue and I will link them below without being able to check them myself.

• 2020-12-27 How to change font defaults in Microsoft Word 2016 for Windows
• 2022-05-31 Christoph Jakob send me this link which helped in his case: fonts - Word automatically switches to Times New Roman whenever I type using a German keyboard layou…
  • He wrote: "The key is the Language English(Switzerland) or English(Germany) spoils the entering."
  • I was using "US international" keyboard layout when I had the issue in the first place. I can't re-test layout switching since I don't have the issue or MS Word any more.