Make text legible on screen without affecting print size

If you’re working on a high-resolution screen, you may find that the Word Normal style (12 point Times New Roman) is too small.

You can always change the point size, but if you are going to print the document, this will result in type that is oversize.

However, there’s a way to get the best of both worlds.

View, Zoom lets you choose from a variety of preset zoom levels or specify your own as a percentage.

I find, as a wearer of glasses, that with a screen resolution of 1,280x1,024, a zoom of 125 per cent results in much better legibility.

Open Office has a similar feature ­ View, Zoom, Variable.

If you rarely use the presets in Word, there’s a way to make the percentage window instantly available without having to open a dialogue box.

In Word 2007 you should have the Zoom Slider available on the right-hand end of the status bar.

If not, right-click on the bar and check the Zoom Slider box at the bottom of the menu.
In other versions of Word, you may already have the percentage box on the standard toolbar.

If not, go to Tools, Customise and turn to the Commands tab. Select View from the categories on the left and you should find the Zoom box is the first item in the list on the right, so drag this on to your chosen toolbar.

In all versions of Word this seems to be ‘sticky’, so the zoom level will stay as you last set it if you close and re-open Word.

In Open Office there’s no direct route to the Zoom percentage while editing, though the Zoom button on the standard toolbar does open the dialogue.

If you don’t see this (a magnifying glass) then go to Tools, Customise, Toolbars and check ‘Zoom…’ is ticked ­ it’s near the bottom of the list, but you can change its position in the list and the toolbar by using the up and down arrows in the Customise dialogue box.

If you click the Add button in the Open Office Customise dialogue box, you’ll see a ‘Preview Zoom’ button.

However, this only works in Print Preview, where you can’t edit the document.

If you find the text in Word’s dialogue boxes too small, this is something that can’t be set in Word, only in Windows.

Although you can spend a lot of time in XP’s Control Panel, Display, Appearance, Advanced tab, you’ll find that you can change pretty much everything except the font size in dialogue boxes.

Experimenting with the high-contrast schemes in Accessibility Options also has no effect on dialogues.

The only way we’ve found is to go to the Settings tab in Display Properties, click the Advanced button and on the General tab, change the DPI settings to the large, or a custom size.

In Vista you’ll find ‘Adjust font size (DPI)’ is a task in Control Panel, Personalisation and it can also be reached through Ease of Access, Make the computer easier to see.

You’ll need to restart the PC for the change to take effect, and you’ll find the changes apply to all programs and users.

Searching for commands
There are those who took to the Word 2007 ribbon like a duck to water.

And there are those who took to it like a duck to cycling. Even after two years, I still find myself searching for commands that aren’t used very often.

Microsoft Office Labs has come up with a solution in Search Commands.

Download and install this and you get an extra ribbon tab with that title in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. At the left of the ribbon is a search pane.

Type what you want to do in this ­ for example ‘Autotext’ and various command results will appear alongside, ranging from ‘Insert Quick Parts’ to ‘Create Autotext’.

Clicking on one of these summons the appropriate command. It also reaches commands that are not in any ribbon.

For example, in previous versions of Word, Tools, Calculate adds or carries out calculations on numbers in the selection.

To do this in 2007 you need to add the Calculate command to the Quick Access Toolbar ­ where it will appear with the rather misleading tooltip ‘Formula’.

However, type ‘calculate’ into the search box ­ and it will return one command: calculate.

Hover the cursor over a result and you should see a brief explanation of the command and, more importantly where to find it on your own in the future.

This last isn’t always as useful as it could be.

Our ‘Autotext’ search produced eight results, but seven of these were labelled ‘Not in the ribbon’.

As we saw in in a word processing column published earlier this year, you can add or customise autotext entries as long as you remember to call them building blocks.

So, the Search Commands ribbon is useful as a panic button, but its educational value could be much improved.