Zooming Relative to Page or Text

Not everyone's a number person. (That's especially true of writers.) So you may prefer to zoom without worrying about percentage figures. The Zoom dialog box (on the View tab, click the magnifying-glass icon) gives you four radio buttons with plain-English zoom settings:

Page width
Click this button, and the page resizes to fill the screen from one side to the other. It's the fastest way to zoom to a text size that most people find comfortable to read. (You may have to scroll, though, to read the page from top to bottom.

Text width
This button zooms in even farther, because it ignores the margins of your page. Use this one if you have a high-resolution monitor (or you've misplaced your reading glasses).

Whole page
When you want to see an entire page from top to bottom and left to right, click this button. It's great for getting an overview of how your headings and paragraphs look on the page.

Many pages
This view is the equivalent of spreading your document out on the floor, and then viewing it from the top of a ladder. You can use it to see how close you are to finishing that five-page paper, or to inspect the layout of a multi-page newsletter.

(Caution) When you're zoomed out to Whole or "Many pages" view, watch those fingers on the keyboard. You can still make changes to your text in these views, even though you can't see what you're doing.

Changing page view from the ribbon

The ribbon offers radio buttons for three popular page views. They're a quick way to change the number of pages you see onscreen without fiddling with zoom controls.

One Page
This view shows the entire page in Word's document window. If your screen is large enough, you can read and edit text in this view.

Two Pages
In this view, you see two pages side by side. This view's handy when you are working with documents that have two-page spreads, like booklets.

Page Width
This button does the exact same thing as the Page Width button in the Zoom dialog box. It's more readable than the One Page and Two Page options, because the page fills the screen from edge to edge, making the text appear larger.