Zoom in on Text Areas to Eliminate Outlook Induced Eyestrain
One great new feature of Outlook 2007 is the ability to zoom in or out on the text and images in the bodies of e-mail messages, calendar entries, tasks, and contacts. If you’ve ever had trouble reading stuff in Outlook because the text is too small, you’re going to love this. The Zoom command is simple to use, and the benefits are obvious to anyone who has spent a day squinting at their computer screen. It only takes a moment to learn how to Zoom, and doing so will let you eliminate one minor annoyance from your life.
But as always, you do need to be aware of a few things when you use this feature.
When you start using Zoom yourself, you will quickly find that text and images in the body of a message, contact, etc. will zoom in and out, but the menus, toolbars, and the like don’t change. Only the spot in the item where you could enter significant quantities of text and images is zoomable. So the body of a message, calendar entry, or task is zoomable. The notes field of a contact is zoomable. Everything else will stay the same size regardless of what you do with the zoom controls. (But keep reading to learn what you can do to make column headers and other interface elements more readable)
Additional things worth knowing before you start to use Zoom:
- The item you want to zoom must be open in its own window.
- The cursor must be located in an area of the item that is capable of zooming. Clicking in that area enables the zoom ability. So if for example, you want to zoom in on the body of a message, you point the mouse at a spot in the message body and click the mouse button. This selects the area and activates the Zoom command. If Zoom isn’t available for the area the cursor is in right now, the Zoom menu option is dimmed.
- The Zoom command appears in the Other Actions menu for messages, and in the Zoom group of the Format Text tab of the Ribbon for other Outlook items.
Zoom is an easy way to change the size of text and images in Outlook areas that are zoomable. You can’t use Zoom to do it, but you can still modify things like column headings and menus. just much more complicated and time consuming. So a good compromise for improving Outlook readability is to use the Zoom command wherever possible, and just accept minor annoyances like too-small column headings.
If you want to know how to adjust menus and other Outlook interface elements, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/change-fonts.html.
To learn more about using Outlook 2007′s Zoom command, visit http://www.living-with-outlook.com/zoom.html