How to Change All Fonts in Google Docs at Once

The typical case: a 40-page document assembled from three older ones. Most of it is in your brand font, but paragraphs of Calibri and Arial are scattered through it, plus a header here and a footnote there. Here are the three ways to clean it up, from quickest to most thorough.

Method 1: Select All and Switch the Font

1. Click anywhere in the document body.
2. Press Ctrl+A (Windows) or Cmd+A (Mac).
3. Open the font menu in the toolbar and choose the new font.

What it misses: Select All stops at the body. Headers, footers and footnotes keep their old fonts; you have to click into each one and repeat. It's also all-or-nothing: if your document deliberately mixes fonts (say, code snippets in a monospace font), they get flattened along with everything else.

One more trap: the document's paragraph styles (Normal text, Heading 1…) still reference the old font. Text you type later in a fresh paragraph can come back in the font you just removed.

Verdict: fine for a short, single-font document. Leaves debris in longer ones.

Method 2: Update the Default Styles

This fixes the "new text reverts" problem by redefining the styles themselves.

1. Format a paragraph exactly how you want Normal text to look (font, size).
2. Go to Format → Paragraph styles → Normal text → Update 'Normal text' to match.
3. Repeat for each heading level you use.
4. Optional: Format → Paragraph styles → Options → Save as my default styles to carry this into future documents.

What it misses: style updates only reach text that still inherits from those styles. Any run where someone applied a font by hand keeps that explicit font. In a document edited by several people, that's usually a lot of text.

Verdict: the right way to set up a document's typography going forward. Doesn't clean up existing overrides.

Method 3: Find and Replace One Font With Another, Everywhere

Google Docs' built-in find-and-replace (Ctrl+H) works on words, not on formatting. Search & Replace Colors and Fonts is the same idea applied to fonts and colors, and it recently added full Google Docs support.

1. Open your document and launch Search & Replace Colors and Fonts from the Extensions menu or the side panel, and authorize it for this document (it only ever accesses the file you grant).
2. Open Replace Fonts. The add-on scans the document and lists every font family it finds, with occurrence counts.
3. Pick the font to replace and the font to replace it with, then run the replacement.

What makes it thorough:

1. It reaches headers, footers, footnotes and tables, and walks every tab of the document, including nested tabs.
2. It replaces only the font you target: your monospace snippets survive.
3. It handles both explicit fonts and text inheriting from named styles, and it can update the document styles themselves (Normal text, Heading 1…) so future text follows too.

Verdict: the only method that swaps one specific font everywhere in one pass. The first replacement is free, so you can clean one real document before deciding to pay.

Working in Google Slides instead? The same add-on does the same job there: see how to change all fonts in Google Slides.

Which Method Should You Use?

Short document, one font everywhere: method 1, done in five seconds. Setting typography rules for a document (or all your future documents): method 2. Cleaning a long or collaborative document where specific fonts crept in: method 3.