Automatically Opening a Document at a Specific Zoom Setting

Unfortunately, Word does not have a setting you can use to specify a default "open" zoom level for your documents. (This would be very nice—Redmond, are you listening?) This means that documents open at the zoom level used when the document was originally saved.

One way to work around this is to create an AutoOpen macro, and then save it in the Normal.Dot file. This macro is then automatically run whenever a document based on the template is opened. Since every document has access to Normal.Dot, every document will have access to the macro.

To make the change, simply open the Normal.Dot template file directly, and then create your macro, as follows:

Public Sub AutoOpen()
    ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Zoom.Percentage = 200
End Sub

Notice that in this very short macro the zoom level is set to 200, which means 200%. If you want some other default zoom level, simply change the value to the desired percentage. Now save and close your Normal.Dot template, and exit Word. When you restart Word and open your other files, they should change to the specified zoom level automatically.