Using a font management program means you don't have to install all the fonts to see or use them. Installing a lot of fonts makes Windows run slower, and there's no reason for 2,000 fonts to load every time you open Excel (or many of the other programs that use fonts) anyway. All the fonts you have installed will load each time you open a program that has a font dropdown menu and most times you don't need that.

A font management program will also give you a preview of the font using any name/phrase you choose and in any size. There are some great free programs. A program like The Font Thing or XFonter lets you look in any folder you want to use to store fonts. An Extra Fonts folder in My Documents works great, or even a folder on a separate hard drive (ie. an external hard drive).

The Font Thing is free and you can get it here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html The Font Thing (TFT). Don't worry that Windows XP is not mentioned as a compatible OS -- the site has not been updated in ages. I'm running XP and TFT works great for me.

Fonts you want to use temporarily can be loaded using TFT. They'll be available in your font dropdown menu (for all applications that use fonts like Word, Excel, etc., in addition to your graphics program) until you restart your computer. Once you restart, the loaded fonts are removed from your dropdown menus and "return" to the folder in which you had them stored. (They're actually in this folder all along, but I don't know how to explain it any other way.)Fonts that are already installed (permanently installed in your Windows Font folder) do not have to be loaded by TFT.

The screen for TFT looks like this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v35/marlynn_p/tftsample.jpg


All you do is use the Browse tab to look in the folder in which you've saved all your Extra Fonts, or your Windows Font folder. Every font in that folder will display in a list on the left and as samples on the right. Use the Preview Selection Box to type in the name/phrase you want TFT to use when displaying samples of the fonts in your chosen folder. That's it.

You also can sort your fonts into subfolders by look (Script, Shapes, Easter/Spring, Christmas/Winter, etc). Then just Browse to the folder you want and TFT will display all the fonts in that folder. You choose the words used in the sample window on the right by typing them into the Preview Selection Box, and also the size in which they'll be displayed (down at the bottom).

If you don't have a ton of fonts (slacker! rofl!) and you just keep everything in a single Extra Fonts folder without subfolders, TFT will let you see all the fonts in that folder in no time, and everything will be displayed using the word(s) you will be using in your project. Often it's important to know exactly what the name looks like in each font. For example, some fonts look really cool -- except for the capital M. If I wasn't able to preview fonts using my name (or DH's or DD's), I wouldn't know to disregard those fonts with crummy capital M's.