(Microsoft) Windows question

[Hawkmoon]

After who knows how many years of using Word with plain vanilla Arial and Times New Roman, I'm getting into work that involves other typefaces, and I find that between Windows 7, Windows 10, Office Pro 2003 and Office Pro 2016, I have way too many fonts to keep track of. It doesn't appear that there's any way to disable them such that they remain installed but don't show up in the drop-down list of fonts in Word and Excel. Have any of you just taken a chain saw to the font list and deleted a bunch of them? If so, how did you decide which ones to delete?

I started pruning, but I think my font list is still much too big. Unfortunately, most of the ones I immediately selected for deletion can't be dleted, because Microsoft says they're system fonts.

[dogmush]

This doesn't really answer your question because I never tried to delete fonts, but if you just click in the font box (the name, not the dropdown arrow) and type the first letter or two of the font it pops right up.  I don't think I've scrolled through that whole dropdown list in a decade.

[Phantom Warrior]

After some quick research it looks like removing fonts from Office is a long standing problem.  There doesn't seem to be a good way to do it.  The workarounds all involve editing the registry.  Which I don't recommend unless you know what you are doing.

Agree with dogmush, start typing the font and auto complete for what you want.  Since at least Office 2010 they also include a "Recently Used Fonts" that should show the last several fonts you've used.  Avoid scrolling and get on with your life.

[Hawkmoon]

I know about recently used fonts, and I know about typing a couple of letters. Those only work if (a) you want a font that you recently used, or (b) you know what the font you're looking for is named. That's how I've survived since I made the jump from WordPerfect to Word however many years ago. As long as I basically used only Arial, Times New Roman, and maybe Courier New once in awhile, that was adequate. Now that I'm into some projects where I want to be a bit more design-y about my font selection, I find myself scrolling down through the list of fonts to see which ones I want to consider. There are just SOOO many that are totally inappropriate -- for my current projects and probably for anything I would ever want to do -- that I started thinking it might be a good idea to pare down the list a bit.

The thing that frosts my buns is that there's a metric boatload of fonts in there that I know I'll never want or need ... and I can't delete them because Microsoft says they're system fonts. Maybe for some dude in Wuhan they're system fonts, but not on my machines.