There is no plug-in or setting in Excel that lets you override a workbook's font for only your own view, and that is exactly the problem. The user who posted this question has been staring at Comic Sans Serif for a year, caught between professional courtesy and personal endurance. The technical answer is frustratingly simple: Excel gives the author control, not the reader. Every font choice is baked into the file, and the only way to change what you see is to change what everyone sees, which invites a tug-of-war no one wins.
This is not a failure of the user's patience. It is a failure of the tool. Spreadsheets were designed for a world where one person owned the document and everyone else accepted the formatting. That world is gone. Today, we collaborate across departments, across preferences, and across aesthetic sensibilities that can clash hard. The user's request, "display this workbook in the normal Calibri font when I am on it", is reasonable, even modest. It asks for a local view layer, not a global edit. Yet Excel treats every font decision as a permanent feature of the spreadsheet, as if the visual experience were a property of the data itself rather than a setting for the person reading it.
What this means in practice is that users like the one who submitted this story have to choose between their own comfort and their colleagues' autonomy. They have already tried the diplomatic route: change the font, watch it get changed back, repeat. That is not a workflow; that is a ritual of compromise. And it highlights a deeper gap in how we think about spreadsheet tools. The data is shared, but the reading experience should be personal. You do not force everyone to read a book in the same typeface just because the author picked one. Why should a spreadsheet be different?
The solution is not a plug-in workaround or a registry hack. It is a design principle: separate the data from its display. A modern spreadsheet should let each collaborator choose how the grid looks to them, without altering the file for others. That is not a luxury feature. It is a basic accommodation for the reality that spreadsheets are now team documents. Until that principle is built in, the best advice we can give is practical and direct: export a local copy, set your own font, and accept that the shared version will remain Comic Sans. The tool should do better. For now, the user's sanity depends on knowing where the boundary lies between what you can change and what you have to live with.