Computer idiosyncrasies and persistence

This morning I enlarged the text of an email message with Entourage of Microsoft Office for the Mac. Suddenly, everytime I moved the mouse the whole screen moved and the display was larger than the physical screen. Fortunately, the pointer moved faster than the screen, and so I could move the pointer to where I needed it. However, this was very annoying and distracting.

I tried resetting the screen size with System Preference, but each resolution gave a bigger screen than the physical display.

I checked that I still had AppleCare but it's Sunday and probably no one is available.

I talked to a friend who is a computer technician at the local university. He had heard about it but couldn't remember the fix.

I often find searching Apple's Knowledge Base a big chore, and so I just did a Google search. The first couple of phrases didn't work, but

macintosh screen bigger display

as separate words got me about 209,000 hits. I was lucky in that the answer was in the first five results. It was at

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-37588.html

Somebody had this problem with OS9 on an iBook in April 2005. The answer was to check Universal Access in System Preferences. Sure enough, Zoom was set on. I turned Zoom off and everything went back to normal. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF!

Why did this happen? How could Entourage turn this on or off? I have increased the text size before without side effects.

When I looked back at Universal Access I noticed that increase zoom in was cmd-option-= and zoom out was cmd-option-- Maybe, just maybe I had not used cmd-shift-= for Entourage text enlargement but had used cmd-option-= Nah! I'm sure that I had used the Edit menu rather than the keyboard. Curiouser and curiouser.

In any case, thanks, Dan, for your help.