Did you know that you can zoom the text size of your web pages in and out?

Often, when people discover this little-known feature by accident, they don’t know how to fix it… “fix” meaning to reset the text size to 100% or “normal” rather than the text zoomed in or out.

Let’s start by demonstrating 3 ways to zoom your Chrome web browser text in or out. 

    1. Ctrl (or Cmd) + your mouse’s scroll-wheel (up = bigger, down = smaller) or laptop’s track pad
      This is the way that most people change this zoom setting inadvertently without understanding what has just happened.
    2. Ctrl (or Cmd) and the + or – on your keyboard, which is a more precise way to increase and decrease zoom (and can sometimes also happen by accident).
    3. Clicking the Menu (three dots in the upper right) and clicking the Zoom + and – (but unlikely to have been done by accident).

Now, here’s the secret sauce in resetting the text size to 100% or “normal”:
Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-0 (zero) or Cmd-0 (zero).

The story behind this tip is that I’d been using Ctrl-0 for years, and while I was visiting my parents a few months ago, my father complained of his Gmail webmail screen being too hard to read because he had to scroll so much from side to side. I reached over his shoulder, hit Ctrl and Zero and instantly his problem was solved.

Knowing what has happened can certainly be extra frustrating or confusing because you can zoom just one web page and it doesn’t affect your other open tabs!

“I’ve been agonizing over this for weeks, and you solved it in one second,” was what my Dad said to me, so I knew I had to share it.