Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Guide to Staying Safe on the Internet — FREE Edition as my thank you for subscribing!

How do I change the size of my email display text?

Question: How do I change the view font on all my Outlook 2003 email folders now that I've moved to a new notebook PC?

Naturally there are several places that control the look, style and size of items on your screen. And naturally, it's difficult to find them all, and when you do, they often don't control exactly, or only, what you want.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!

So these are some approaches I'd look into:

  • Change the resolution of your screen (affects everything). If you're running 1280x1024, change to 1024x768. Text (and everything else, for that matter) will appear bigger. That's in Control Panel, Display, Settings.
  • Another approach that achieves similar results is to change the "DPI", or "Dots Per Inch" setting of your display. That, too, is in Control Panel, Display, Settings, in the Advanced tab. This article has more on it as well: How can I make the text on my screen larger?
  • Now, I haven't done this extensively, so I don't know how difficult it is to get ALL of Outlook to change, but on Outlook's View menu, hit Arrange By, and then Custom will allow you to select the fonts to be used for that view.
  • You can also look at Options, Mail Format, Fonts and select a larger size, though that will also impact the actual font size used in any HTML you might send.
  • And finally as you view a message, if your mouse has a wheel, ctrl+rolling the wheel will increase or decrease the text size for most (though not all HTML) messages.

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

16 comments on “How do I change the size of my email display text?”

  1. Your article addresses the screen display text size. I am having problems with the text size as printed. In general the headings are an OK size, but the body of the message is bigger–too big. How do I change it? Thanks.

    Reply
  2. How do I decrease the size of the text of my home page, as well as the email pages? Somehow, I was able to enlarge the font, but do not remember how I did that; so I can’t reverse the problem. Thank you, Mary Anne Dolan

    Reply
  3. Good God. Thank you Leo, I accidentally changed the view size on my Outlook text and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. That was driving me nuts.
    God bless you!! ;-)

    Reply
  4. I had the same problem with text being too small and changed the printer preferences back to “Factory Setting” and it resolved the problem with both a HP and a Dell printer.

    Reply
  5. leo help me to solve my email. How do I decrease the size of the text on my email pages? Somehow, I was able to enlarge the font, butI can’t reverse the problem. please help me it is annoying.

    Reply
  6. Hi my mother’s aol email is now printing not only the message from email but all the information on the left side i.e. all her folders so her printed email does not fit on a page – and when she goes to print info on a website not all the information fits on a page either- can you help>

    Reply
  7. Hello, I have somehow enlarged the text of the yahoo mail screen i.e. all the words like INBOX; DRAFT etc, everything is so large that I cannot get more than a small part of the normal screen on the screen now. I have no toolbar visible so that I could try to change it back to normal. What do I do? Please help!

    Reply
  8. @Kaija,
    Try holding down the ctrl key and tapping the minus key a few times. That will zoom out the browser. Typing ctrl-0 (zero) will bring it back to 100%. If that doesn’t help, you’ll need to look through the settings on Yahoo and see if your inadvertent change was made there somewhere.

    Reply

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.