The Formula Bar Font in Excel

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The Formula Bar Font in Excel
This short blog explains why you might have noticed a recent change to the font used in Excel's formula bar, the reasoning behind the change and how to switch it back if you don't like it!

Posted by Andrew Gould on 21 July 2025

In this blog

Monospace fonts
I don't like it, how do I change it back?
Changing the formula bar font
What could be improved

If you've ever created an Excel workbook for someone else to read, you've probably spent at least some time formatting cells to make things more readable. But have you ever paid attention to the font used in the formula bar? If you've been using Excel for as long as we have, you may have noticed a change to the formula bar font in recent Excel updates.

Here, the fonts used in the cell and the formula bar are different.

Monospace fonts

Microsoft first announced this change back in 2023 and it's been gradually rolling out to users since. The big change is that the formula bar now uses a monospace font by default. Monospace fonts are those in which every character occupies the same number of pixels and they're commonly used in programming as they help you to spot typing mistakes.

This feature came in very handy on a recent training course when a delegate had an error when entering a formula. See if you can spot the problem in the screenshot below:

An Excel nested IF function with an error message

Can you spot the problem?

Now look at the same formula in the formula bar with a monospaced font:

The problem is more pronounced in the formula bar.

The problem is that instead of using double-quotes around the word Loser, we've used two apostrophes. To me, this is much easier to spot in the formula bar: the characters around the word Loser are clearly different to those around the other strings in the formula.

I don't like it, how do I change it back?

I'm a big fan of this change but you may well not be! If you want the formula bar to return to its traditional behaviour, you can disable the monospace font option. To do this, from the Excel ribbon choose File | Options. On the dialog box which appears, select the Formulas tab and uncheck the option shown in the diagram below:

The Excel options dialog box to disable monospace fonts

Uncheck the Use monospace font for all formulas box and click OK.

Doing this returns the formula bar to using the default font for the workbook (which is Aptos Narrow in my case):

Excel's formula bar using a different font

The formula bar is using Aptos Narrow, while the cell is using Calibri.

Changing the formula bar font

If you want to change the font used in the formula bar, you can change the workbook's default font. To do this, from the Excel ribbon choose File | Options. On the dialog box which appears, select the General tab and change the option shown in the diagram below:

Choosing a default workbook font in Microsoft Excel

Let's go old-school!

You'll then need to restart Excel for the change to take effect.

A different font used in Microsoft Excel's formula bar

This isn't an improvement!

What could be improved

As mentioned, I'm a fan of the monospace font in the formula bar and I'll continue to use it. In fact, I don't think this change goes far enough! I'd love for the Excel formula bar to behave more like the DAX formula editor in Power BI where it's easy to write formulas across multiple lines with consistent indenting and comments!