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 1680×1024 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.