Zooming in Office for Mac 2008

by Larry on June 9, 2009

in general

This is a great tip for zooming in Word, Excell, and PowerPoint. It works for Office for Mac 2004 and 2008. The only application it does not work with is Entourage.

How To:

  • Hold down Command and Control and use the Scroll Wheel on your mouse.
  • or
  • Hold down Command and Control and Drag your fingers up/down on a scroll-enabled trackpad.

Here is a quote from the article

Microsoft’s Office 2004 suite is no exception—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (but not Entourage) all feature a View -> Zoom menu item. But using it is a bit time consuming. First you choose the menu, then you pick a pre-set zoom level, or enter your own value, and then click OK. You can also put a button on the toolbar which does something similar. Still, it’s hardly a fast and fluid operation.

Enter the mouse. In all three of the above applications, if you hold down Command and Control and then move the scroll wheel on your mouse (or drag your fingers on a scrolling-enabled trackpad), you can rapidly increase or decrease the zoom level. Move the wheel up, and you’ll zoom in; move it down, and you’ll zoom out. The amount the zoom changes with each tick of the scroll wheel varies between the applications. Word seems to go in 10-percent steps; Excel uses 15-percent increments; and PowerPoint steps through the fixed zoom levels (including ‘fit,’ which means I had a stop at 152 percent) in its Zoom menu. Excel and PowerPoint are also limited to 400-percent maximum zoom, while Word will go up to 500 percent.

Macworld: Set Office 2004 zoom levels via mouse

Enjoy :)

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Moses Gunesch, creator of Fuse Kit and ZigoEngine , has developed an AS3 Class which handles mouse interactions when dealing with transparent PNG’s.

Here is the theory:
If you have a PNG (one that contains transparent areas) embedded inside of a MovieClip button, the rectangle of the image acts as the hitArea of the MovieClip. In order for the hitArea to only be defined by visible areas of the image, you would normally have to create a custom mask in order to hide the transparent areas of the PNG. This AS3 Class allows you to specify an alpha tolerance (0=transparent, 255=completely opaque), that will allow you to selective exclude the transparent areas from your hitArea based on the value that you give it. This is a very simple concept, but an intricate implementation.

The project is open-sourced under the MIT  Open Source License. Go and check it out:

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HAMSoft Engineering: What’s Keeping Me?

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