Quickly Changing Font Sizes

Summary: A quick little shortcut can help you easily step through different font sizes for whatever text you've selected. Word provides a shortcut for increasing font sizes and another for decreasing font sizes. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

Word allows you a great deal of control over the size of the font used in your documents. If you want to change font sizes quickly, you can follow these steps:

Select the text whose font size you want to change.
Press Ctrl+> to increase the size of the font.
Press Ctrl+< to decrease the size of the font.

(Remember that to access the < or > keys, you must hold down the Shift key. Thus, some people may refer to these shortcuts as Shift+Ctrl+> and Shift+Ctrl+<. This notation is redundant, however.)

Exactly how much the font size is increased or decreased depends. At smaller point sizes (12 or under), the point size is changed by a single point. Between 12 and 72 points, you are actually stepping through the point sizes available on the pull-down font size tool on the Formatting toolbar or in the Font group of the Home tab on the ribbon of Word 2007 (12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 36, 48, and 72). Thereafter, the font size is changed by increments of ten points. You can use this method to reduce a point size to a single point or to as large as 1638 points.

Tip #1767 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Quickly Changing Font Sizes