Zooming In On Your Worksheet

When you are working with your data, you may want to enlarge what you see on the screen without actually changing the font size used by Excel. For instance, you may have formatted your text so that it uses a small font. (This is often necessary to get all your information on a printout.) When working in the worksheet, however, the font is difficult to read because it is so small.

The solution to this problem is to use the zooming capabilities of Excel to enlarge just what is displayed on the screen. Excel provides two primary methods to zoom in on your data. First, you can use the Zoom control at the bottom-right of the Excel window, at the very right-hand side of the status bar. Just drag the control to the left or to the right and Excel adjusts the size of what you see on the screen.

You can also see a selection of different zooming options by displaying the Zoom dialog box. There are two ways you can display the dialog box:

• Display the View tab of the ribbon and click the Zoom tool in the Zoom group.
• Click the Zoom Level percentage shown just to the left of the Zoom control at the bottom-right of the Excel window. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Zoom dialog box.

Note that the Zoom dialog box includes six predefined zoom settings, plus a way you can specify any magnification level you want, between 10% and 400%. When you are done with your selection, just click on OK.

It is helpful to note that the Zoom group, on the View tab of the ribbon, includes two tools in addition to the Zoom tool. These two zooming tools will be very helpful to many people because they allow you to zoom in on whatever cells you have selected on the screen (Zoom to Selection tool) and to return to a normal display (100% tool).

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9093) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Zooming In On Your Worksheet.