How to zoom in or out in Google Slides

Google Slides can be a lifesaver if you need to work on a presentation from anywhere, especially if you don’t have (or want) PowerPoint. To do a project justice, though, you should do detail work — so here’s how to zoom in and out on your web creations.

How to zoom in or out in Google Slides

There are a few ways to control zoom, the most granular being your keyboard. Select a slide, then hit Control-Alt-Plus to zoom in, and Control-Alt-Minus to zoom out. Your view will change in small increments. Click and drag the vertical and horizontal sliders to pan around. If your mouse has a scrollwheel, you can pan that way as well.

Since keyboard zoom can become tedious, there are a few mouse-based options that are less precise, but save time. The first is to just click on the Zoom icon (a magnifying glass) in the toolbar, then click on the part of a slide you want blown up. Since this zooms in quite a bit, you might want to use keyboard zoom to refine things.

To zoom out using your mouse, click the down arrow next to the Zoom icon. This opens a drop-down menu with four options: Fit, 50%, 100%, and 200%. Of these, Fit is probably the most useful, since it zooms out to show the entirety of a slide, maximizing the space available in your browser. If that’s too much, 100% will probably do the trick. 50% isn’t terribly useful, since on modern 2K, 4K, and 5K displays, you might as well be looking at a thumbnail.

200%, of course, is another zoom-in method. This is mildly useful, typically if you want to zoom in but you’re not sure exactly how far you need to go. Often you can see (and do) what you need to without having to go further.