Microsoft Word has offered a slider for zooming in and out of documents for many years, but there's never been convenient keyboard shortcuts for zooming. That's finally changing.

Microsoft announced that it is now testing zoom keyboard shortcuts in the Microsoft 365 Insider program (formerly the Office Insider program). Pressing Ctrl and the minus key will zoom out, and pressing Ctrl and the plus key will zoom in, just like with most web browsers and the Word web app. The Ctrl+0 shortcut will return to 100% zoom, and holding down Control while scrolling your mouse wheel will also zoom in and out. Those shortcuts will also work on Mac computers, but with the Command key instead of Control.

The company explained in a blog post, "In the case of keyboard shortcuts, the industry standard has diverged from Word's initial implementation of these features. Indeed, users expect that Ctrl + +/-- will zoom in and out, so when this doesn't work, the experience can be frustrating. The Word team has heard about this problem from users, so we're updating keyboard shortcuts as a direct response to this feedback. Accessibility is a priority for Word, and we want to make the zooming experience as seamless as possible."

Microsoft is also working on a keyboard shortcut for Word that pastes text without formatting, which follows the now-standard Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac), and the updated zoom controls is another step in that direction. There will also be settings options to revert everything back to the previous behavior, since the new zoom and paste shrortcuts replace other actions that were set to those keys.

The new zoom options are available to people in the Microsoft 365 Insider program, running Word version 16.0.15831.20174 or later on Windows, and Word version 16.67.1113.0 or later on Mac. Once any bugs are sorted out, it should roll out to everyone.

Source: Microsoft 365 Insider Blog