Zoom in, zoom out!

When you want to zoom in or zoom out of a Word document, do you find it irritating to have to interrupt your typing or editing to navigate with your mouse to the toolbar at the top?

Well, you can save quite a bit of time and energy doing this if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel.

Just hold down the Control (Ctrl) key and scroll up to zoom in and scroll down to zoom out. This should work with both PC and Mac versions of recent versions of Word (at least Word 2000 onwards for PC and Word X onwards for Mac).

Another useful shortcut that I use is to assign a keyboard shortcut to one of Word's inbuilt zoom commands:

1. Go into Tools > Customize...
2. In the resulting dialogue box, click on the Keyboard... button at the bottom.
3. This will bring up the Customize Keyboard dialogue box.
4. In the Categories: pane, top left, select View.
5. This will bring up, in the pane on the right, all the related built-in commands for View.
6. Scroll down to the bottom of this list of options and you will see the various zoom commands: ViewZoom100, ViewZoom200, ViewZoom75, ViewZoomPageWidth or ViewZoomWholePage, which, as you might expect, result in zooming to 100%, 200%, 75%, the page width or the whole page respectively. I personally prefer to use the ViewZoomPageWidth option as that works best for me when I edit.
7. Click on this once and then click once on the box called Press new shortcut key:.
8. Select a keyboard shortcut which you would like to use, preferably one that is memorable and doesn't clash with one of the inbuilt keyboard shortcuts - I use Ctrl+W on my Mac, PC users might want to use Ctrl+Shift+W.
9. Exit the dialogue boxes by clicking on the Okay buttons and now you can use your new shortcut to instantly make the text zoom as required.

This latter method is especially useful if you don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel and therefore can't use the first tip.