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New Zoom shortcuts in Word

Linda_C's avatar
Linda_C
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Aug 25, 2024

(Originally published on Mar 9, 2023 by Ali Forelli)

 

Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Ali Forelli, a Product Manager on the Word team working on Accessibility features. I’m happy to announce that zooming in and out of your page has become easier with new shortcuts in Word for Windows and Word for Mac! Try these shortcuts here.

New Zoom shortcuts in Word

 

New Zoom shortcuts in Word

 

With the increased prevalence of remote work in the past few years, reading and consuming information on a multitude of devices and screen sizes has become the norm.

 

Previously, people could sit in a conference room with a projector for document presentations, work from their multi-monitor desks, or have easy access to printed content for review. Nowadays, an increasing number of users are consuming most of their content on smaller personal screens, such as laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. With these new shortcuts, the Word Product team is making it easier than ever for you to zoom your document to the right level for your screen.

 

How it works

Many of you use Ctrl+/- to zoom in and out in your browser and in Word for the web. And you have asked for this functionality to also be available in Word for Windows and Mac. Check them out!

 

While mouse/key focus is in your document:

 

  • Use Ctrl + - to zoom out
  • Use Ctrl + + to zoom in
  • Use Ctrl + 0 to return back to 100% zoom
  • Use Ctrl + Scroll to zoom in and out

NOTE: In Word for Mac, use the Cmd key instead of the Ctrl key.

 

Feedback in action

Word has been a product since 1983 (Word turns 40 this year!). This long-standing legacy creates a precedent for established user expectations. While the engineering team continues to work on new features for improved user experiences with refreshed and more advanced technology, we don’t always have the opportunity to revise pre-existing behavior.

 

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. 

Other changes to shortcuts

With the new addition of these zoom shortcuts, some existing shortcuts have changed. Below is a table of the full list of changes.

Command

Legacy Shortcut

New Shortcut (Windows)

New Shortcut (Mac)

Zoom In

 

Ctrl + +

Cmd + +

Zoom Out

 

Ctrl + -

Cmd + -

Zoom to 100%

 

Ctrl + 0

Cmd + 0

Em-dash

Ctrl + Alt + Num-

Ctrl + Alt + Num-

Shift + Option + -

En-dash

Ctrl + Num-

Ctrl + Num-

Option + Num-

Optional Hyphen

Ctrl + -

Ctrl + Alt + -

Cmd + Option + -

Non-breaking Hyphen

Ctrl + Shift + -

Shift + Alt + -

Shift + Option + -

Subscript

Ctrl + +

Ctrl + Shift + -

Cmd + Shift + -

Add or remove one line space preceding a paragraph

Ctrl + 0

Line and Paragraph Spacing Menu

Line and Paragraph Spacing Menu

 

NOTE: Superscript remains as is with the Ctrl + Shift + + shortcut.

Want to restore the previous shortcut settings?

To restore the keyboard shortcut assignments to their original settings, you can head over to the Customize Keyboard Shortcuts help article. Below you will find a table of the command names which you may want to reset.

Feature  

Command Name 

Previous Shortcut (Windows) 

Zoom In 

ViewZoomIn 

None 

Zoom Out 

ViewZoomOut 

None 

Zoom to 100% 

Zoom100 

None 

Subscript 

Subscript 

Ctrl + + 

Optional Hyphen 

Optional Hyphen 

Ctrl + - 

Nonbreaking Hyphen 

Nonbreaking Hyphen 

Ctrl + Shift + - 

Add or remove one line space preceding a paragraph 

OpenOrCloseUpPara 

Ctrl + 0 

 

Note: The Optional and Nonbreaking hyphen commands are in the Common Symbols category of the Customize Keyboard dialog. All other commands can be found in the All Commands category.

 

Availability

Zoom shortcuts in Word are available to Beta Channel users running:

  • Windows: Version 16.0.15831.20174 or later
  • Mac: Version 16.67.1113.0 or later
  • Web: Try these shortcuts here

(2/20/24) UPDATE: Since publishing this post, we heard from many of you that the Optional Hyphen and Nonbreaking Hyphen shortcuts were important to your workflows. Rather than having you insert them via the Symbols dialog box, we’ve added new shortcuts to give you quicker access. To use these newly added shortcuts, Beta Channel users need to be running:

  • Windows: Version 2402 (Build 17328.20108)
  • Mac: Version 16.82 (Build 24021813)

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

 

Feedback

Please share your feedback with us directly from Word by going to Help > Feedback. We’re excited to hear from you!

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Insider program and sign up for the Microsoft 365 Insider newsletter to get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month!

Updated Jul 31, 2025
Version 8.0
mac
word

41 Comments

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  • BadsBB's avatar
    BadsBB
    Copper Contributor
    May 17, 2025

    WHY??!?!?!?!?!?
    Why did you remove the superscript shortcut??

  • DavidG4P's avatar
    DavidG4P
    Brass Contributor
    May 12, 2025

    @Moderators, can you stop deleting this comment which does not contain any profanity AND a solution for the issue.

    So now you went and changed it in Outlook too? Same shortcut remapping as in Word, only this time minus the blog post, minus a pop-up in the actual application, and minus any way to undo it, because Outlook doesn’t let users remap shortcuts?

    So I tried to fix it via AutoHotkey -- just a small patch to bring back my decades-old muscle memory. At least so I thought.

    What followed was three solid hours of me bashing my head against Unicode, clipboard formats, encoding tests, BOM checks, Chr(8209), Send(), SendInput(), SendText(), SendRaw() -- all of it failing, because Outlook silently swallows the character and lets me believe I was going insane.

    Here’s the only lines that finally work, after wasting my entire evening:

    #Requires AutoHotkey 2
#HotIf ; catch those hotkeys in Outlook and Word
{
    WinActive("ahk_exe OUTLOOK.EXE") ||  
    WinActive("ahk_exe WINWORD.EXE")
}
^-::Send("^!-")  ; optional hyphen via CTRL+MINUS, as before
^+-::Send("+!-") ; protected hyphen via SHIFT+CTRL+MINUS, as before
#HotIf

    Next time you break basic input behavior across Office apps, how about you stop acting like you're in witness protection and tell users are about it in the very application itself.

  • Roadbug's avatar
    Roadbug
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 28, 2025

    This change is really bad! Is there a way of reverting it?
    Who had the stupid idea of changing shortcuts? Why not let the user change their shortcuts?

  • DoNotChangeWithoutAnnouncement's avatar
    DoNotChangeWithoutAnnouncement
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 26, 2025

    Thank you for this information. Why do I have to search the internet to be able to understand that Word changed its shortcuts and to get a workaround? Why doesn't Word announce what it has changed? This would be the least thing -- if you change something, you explain it to the users, but do it in the programme and not in some obscure "insider" blog. And then, you will never be able to explain why the old and good "CTRL+SHIFT+ -" had to be changed. This doesn't make any sense. STOP changing our Shortcuts. Think about real improvements.

  • PRI's avatar
    PRI
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 14, 2025

    I need the french names for all of these commands, because it is f*#'!&%g impossible to find them anywhere.

  • Ronald_45vccxb5r's avatar
    Ronald_45vccxb5r
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 12, 2025

    Somehow this update just creeped it's way ito my office, and it f*cking sucks. Stop changing shortcuts! How the bleeb do I change it back?

  • JohanRandomnumbertag's avatar
    JohanRandomnumbertag
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 27, 2025

    This truly and utterly sucks. I am perfectly content with zooming by holding ctrl and scrolling my mouse wheel. Ctrl-hyphen is meant to be soft hyphen, and has been so since before the dawn of time.