If you’ve ever sent a long message in Microsoft Teams and wished it looked a little less like a wall of text, you’re not alone. Whether you want to bold a key point, make a heading stand out in a channel post, or just increase the font size for easier reading, Teams offers more formatting options than most people realize.
In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through every way you can change the font style in Microsoft Teams — from the basic formatting toolbar to keyboard shortcuts, accessibility settings, and even a handy workaround for when you want more control over how your text looks.
Let’s get into it.
What You Can (and Can’t) Change in Microsoft Teams
Before we start, let me set the right expectations, because this is where a lot of people get confused.
Microsoft Teams does not let you change the default font for the entire app. So if you were hoping to make every message show up in, say, Arial or Georgia by default, that’s not possible right now. Microsoft hasn’t built that feature in yet.
What you can do is:
- Change the font size (Small, Medium, Large) within a message
- Apply bold, italic, underline, strikethrough
- Add text color and highlighting
- Use headings, bullet points, and numbered lists
- Adjust the overall display size of the Teams interface through zoom/accessibility settings
Those last two points are really useful if your goal is readability rather than purely style. Okay, now let’s look at each method one by one.
Change Font Style in Microsoft Teams
Here I will tell you different ways to change font style in Microsoft Teams.
Method 1: Using the Format Toolbar in Teams Chat
This is the main way to change font style in Teams. It works in both chat messages and channel posts.
Here’s how to do it:
- Open a Chat or go to a Teams channel.
- Click inside the compose box where you type your message.
- Look at the bottom of the compose box — you’ll see a small toolbar row. Click the Format button (it looks like an “A” with a pencil icon, or sometimes just says “Format”).
- This expands the compose box and opens the full formatting toolbar above your text area.
- Now, before or after typing your text, use the toolbar to format it.
Once that toolbar is open, here’s what you’ll find:
- Font style dropdown — You can pick from options like Calibri, Arial, and Times New Roman
- Font size — Small, Medium, or Large
- Bold (B) — Makes text heavier and more prominent
- Italic (I) — Slants the text slightly for emphasis
- Underline (U) — Adds a line beneath the text
- Strikethrough — Draws a line through the middle of the text
- Highlight — Adds a colored background behind text
- Text color — Changes the color of the text itself
- Headings — H1, H2, H3 for structured posts
- Bullet list and Numbered list
- Quote block
- Code snippet
- Link insertion
Example: Say you’re writing a project update in a channel. You could type the title, select it, set it to H1, and make it Bold. Then write your bullet points below with key items highlighted in yellow. The result looks almost like a mini document inside Teams, way more readable than a block of plain text.
Quick tip:<