Adjust Text Zoom in Windows

This article covers the scaling of text in Windows, where that feature is supported. In addition to people using the feature deliberately, it is not uncommon for someone to zoom their text inadvertently, and then wonder why the text seems so small or so big, and not representative of what the controlling application (e.g., Word, Outlook) says the font size is. This article tries to make all that clear. :-)

Use Ctrl + [mouse scroll wheel] to adjust text zoom

The adjustment is very simple: hold down the Ctrl key, and spin the mouse's scroll wheel back and forth. The UI will briefly tell you what the zoom level is, and then go back to what it was doing before. So, if this is the starting point we have: a new message in Outlook 365, using the default 11-point text font in the body:

Using Ctrl + [scroll] to adjust the text to 70% of original size would briefly show this:

And then the UI would return to the text, still 11pt font size, but view-scaled down to 70% of original display size:

Similarly, scaling up to 250% would make things much bigger, still without changing that it is 11pt font size:

Things to remember

Adjusting the text zoom does not impact the underlying screen resolution.
Adjusting the text zoom does not impact the font size as specified in the host application.
Adjusting the text zoom does not carry through to your email's recipient(s) - you'd need to explicitly adjust the true font size for that.
If you do not have a mouse with a scroll wheel, but are still affected by the condition, you can always call the Helpdesk and we can adjust the text for you through the remote session. :-)