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Outlook 2007 Menu Font

If you installed Outlook 2007 and you hate the menu font, it’s probably because you don’t like Cleartype. I can’t stand it. And it’s bad enough that in order to get rid of that hideous Segoe UI font in Outlook 2007 you have to change it in about 5 places. I can’t even remember them well enough to list them here. Great UI design, guys.

But there’s one thing that remains almost impossible to figure out: the menu bar. The “File, Edit, View, Go, Tools…” piece at the top. It’s always in Segoe UI, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. However, you can make it look a little better. Right click on your desktop (or use your favorite method for getting to your Display Properties control panel), select the “Appearance” tab, press “Effects…”, and DE-SELECT “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”. By default when you install XP it’s set to “Cleartype”, and even if you change it to “Standard” the Outlook 2007 menu font looks terrible. But if you turn the feature off entirely by de-selecting it, the Segoe UI font in the menu bar doesn’t look all that bad anymore.

Hope that helps.