My Mum and Dad came to visit last week and as always they’d saved up some PC questions for me (they also brought some French crepes so I didn’t mind too much!) One thing Dad asked about was how you change the size of text on the screen. He knows how to do it in a word processor, to change the text size of a letter you’re writing, for example, but what about the text in programs themselves.

Well, there are a few different answers.

You can change the screen resolution. This is how many dots the PC uses to make up the screen. Typical is 1024 by 768 dots. But if you changed it to 800 by 600, everything would be a bit bigger. You can right click on an empty part of the desktop, select “Properties” then “Settings” and use the slider on the left to change this setting. The flipside is that it would all be a bit blockier as well — so it’s not the best way.

Another way is to just change the font size. Again, right click on the desktop and click on “properties” but this time select “Appearance”. You can use the drop down menu to change the font size, or click on advanced which allows you to change the fonts size for specific objects (for example just menus or just the taskbar) individually… that last way is a little tricky, though.

If it’s only websites that you want to change the size of, in Internet Explorer click on “View” and then select “Text Size” and pick the one you’d like. It doesn’t work with all websites, though. Basically if the web designer choose a specific size for their text, it won’t change when you change this setting.

One last related thing: there’s also something called the magnifier which lets you, well, magnify the part of the screen that you’re pointing the mouse at. You can start it by going to the Start menu, then clicking on Programs, Accessories, Accessibility, Magnifier. If it’s not there, it isn’t installed on your PC: go to the start menu, then help and type in “install accessibility” to get help on how to install it. It’s a nifty little tool.

Tim Wakeling writes a free monthly email newsletter about computers, which this article is taken from. You can sign up to the newsletter at http://www.osaat.co.uk/Emailnews2.htm You can also find more free articles by Tim at http://www.osaat.co.uk

© Tim Wakeling, UK 2005. You may re-publish this article online and in print as long as you leave it unchanged.

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