Zoom in on Text Areas to Ease Outlook Eyestrain

One great new feature of Outlook 2007 is the ability to zoom in or out on the body text 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 clear to anyone who has spent a day squinting at their monitor trying to read their mail. It only takes a moment to learn how to Zoom, and could save you some eyestrain.

But as always, you do need to be aware of a few things when you use it.

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 part of the item where you could enter significant quantities of text and images is zoomable. This means that the body of a message, calendar entry, or task will zoom. 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 because there are things you can do to make menus and column headers and the like easier to read)

Here's what else to know about Zoom:

• The item you want to zoom must be open in its own window. Zoom doesn't work in the Reading Pane.
• 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 you want to zoom the body of a message, you point the mouse at a spot in the message body and click the mouse button to activate 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 a fast and simple way to adjust one of Outlook 20007's zoomable areas. While you can't zoom things like column headings and menus, there is a way to modify these. And the changes stick from session to session. But it takes a lot of time and is somewhat complex. So a good compromise that improves readability without too much work is to use Zoom wherever possible, and live with the small headings and so on.

To learn 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