When Word 2007 is in reading mode, there’s a special menu titled “View Options” in the top right corner of the screen. In this menu there are entries to increase and decrease the text size – pretty useful for me, because I like to lean back and relax while reading stuff on screen, rendering the default font size a bit too small for comfort on my machine’s 1680x1024 resolution.

The problem is that the increase in font size for each click to the menu entry is not very large, so I like to select the entry a number of times. But then the menu closes every time, so that’s not a good idea either. Apparently Microsoft thought it wouldn’t be good to remember the text size between Word runs… well. Anyway, I wanted to find out how to increase the text size using the keyboard, which would be faster and more comfortable at the same time.

I looked around quite a bit for information on this, but I wasn’t successful. In the end, I used the old approach of recording a macro to figure out what the names of the underlying commands are: ReadingModeGrowFont and ReadingModeShrinkFont. I bound the combinations Ctrl+Alt+Up and Ctrl+Alt+Down to these commands and now things work fine.

Ah yes, the button to configure keyboard shortcuts is at Big Round Ribbon Button | Word Options | Customization, right at the bottom. No really, it’s there – for some unknown reason I missed it the first eleven times or so.