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. The ability to zoom like this can be a huge benefit for anyone who has trouble reading the text on the screen. The Zoom command is quick and easy to use, and the benefits of being able to zoom will be obvious to anyone who has spent a day squinting at their computer screen. Learning to use Zoom will only take a few minutes, and could save you some eyestrain.

But as always, there are a few things to be aware of when you use this feature.

When you start using Zoom yourself, you may notice 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 large quantities of text and images zooms. So the body of a message, calendar entry, or task will zoom, and the notes field of a contact. 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 menus and column headers and the like more readable)

Here’s what else to know about Zoom:

• The item has to be in its own window. Zoom doesn’t work in the Reading Pane.
• If 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 the area the cursor is in right now isn’t zoomable (say the Subject line of a message), the Zoom menu option is dimmed.
• You will find the Zoom command in the Other Actions menu for messages, while it is 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. You can’t use Zoom to do it, but you can still modify things like column headings and menus. And the changes stick from session to session. But it takes a lot of time and is somewhat complex. So a good compromise for improving Outlook readability is to use the Zoom command wherever possible, and live with the small headings and so on.

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

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