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How do I "zoom" my MacBook / iMac screen?

At a conference last week i saw someone make some sort of finger motion on his MacBook Air trackpad and have the screen "zoom in" and get bigger, so he could explain something to his listeners. Awesome. I want. How do I do this?


Dave's Answer:

I know what you're talking about and it's one of the many cool gestures that the trackpad on your MacBook, MacBook Air, or, if you're using the "magic trackpad" bluetooth trackpad from Apple with your iMac or similar, lets you accomplish if you've enabled it.

And that's the trick: by default most of the multi-finger gestures on your Mac are not enabled by default. On the other hand, the system preference area where you can tweak the settings of your trackpad is one of the most informative and interesting in the entire operating system, with over a dozen training videos built right in.

Let me show you how to enable Screen Zoom and you'll see what I mean about all the videos embedded.

Step one is to choose "System Preferences..." from the Apple menu on the top left corner of your screen. Once you're there, look in the middle of the window for "Trackpad":

mac screen zoom 1

Click on "Trackpad" and you're in the zone:

mac screen zoom 2

Move your cursor around: as you move over different options for the multi-touch trackpad, you'll see the video changes to demonstrate both the gesture and result in a short video. Brilliant!

The feature you want to enable to get that cool zoom feature is Screen Zoom:

mac screen zoom 3

As a tip, click on "Options..." and tweak it just a bit too while you're at it:

mac screen zoom 4

I find that when I have Screen Zoom enabled on my MacBook Pro I like to also choose to have the screen image also move so that the cursor is near the center. Otherwise you can get a bit lost when the cursor is off-screen.

I'll also note that screen capture utilities act very weird when you've zoomed your screen, so if that's part of what you want to accomplish (perhaps recording some training videos) you've been warned.

Still, even if you don't plan on enabling any of the multitouch trackpad capabilities, I encourage you to check out how incredibly well Apple's designed this particular system preference, with built-in training and help information. If only the rest of the operating system were that well designed...


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Comments (2) · Add Comment

You can also do this on a Mac with just a mouse (that doesn't have a trackpad) and holding down a keyboard key. I use it on my home iMac all the time. You access the Scroll Zoom settings in your mouse control panel. The control panel looks slightly different depending on your OS but I can confirm that it works using a Mighty Mouse on my Mac Pro OS X 10.5.8 as well as a Magic Mouse on my iMac running Snow Leopard. I think the default key is to hold down the "Control" key while scrolling on the mouse. Pretty handy tool. Thanks again Apple!

Posted by: Pat at January 14, 2011 12:43 PM

If you only have a mouse wheeled mouse or a older whaite macbook, all you have to do is hold ctrl key down and then use two finger touch on the macbook and tweek the wheel on the mouse.

The screen enlarges

Posted by: Bill Grant at February 2, 2011 4:14 AM
Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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