Relief for Tired QuickBooks Eyes
As I get older I find that my eyesight, which didn’t start off all that great, is declining. Larger monitors help, but they tend to crowd in more information rather than make the text larger. I prefer to set larger font sizes in the programs I use. Today I’ll give you a tip on how to make some adjustments in QuickBooks.
Please note that this isn’t a perfect solution, and that you should use caution when making these changes. I’m using the 2008 release for this, and there could be variations in other years of product.
What we are going to do is to edit a configuration file named “QBW.INI”. This contains a number of settings, and you should be careful to only change those that you are absolutely sure about. BE CAREFUL!
Finding and Editing QBW.INI
There are several ways of doing this, I’ll use the simplest. Run QuickBooks and open a company file. Press the F2 key, and you will see a window similar to the following:
Lots of interesting information here (particularly the list information box on the right), but that’s a discussion for another day.
When this window is open, press the F3 key, and you will see the following:
Select the Open File tab, scroll down the file list and click on QBW.INI, and click the Open File button.
This should open the file with Windows Notepad, as it is a simple text file. Your file will probably vary from what I’m showing here, but it will be close.
DO NOT change anything that you aren’t sure about!
You should see a line that says “[Fonts]“, near the top. If you do not, you can add it in the location we show here. In the “Fonts” section, before the next line that starts with a square bracket, add two lines exactly as follows:
FontName=Arial
FontSize=12
Select File and then Exit and tell the program to save the file.
Exit QuickBooks, then restart it. Many but not All fonts will be changed. If you don’t like the results you can follow the same procedure and just delete the lines we added.
Changed Appearance
Here are some “before” and “after” screen shots.
As you can see, some of the fonts have changed, others have not. In some cases you may find that a window becomes hard to work when the fonts are larger.
It isn’t a perfect solution (we often seem to be saying that with QuickBooks), but for some people it can help.
Category: General Tips
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Look for Charlie’s articles in the QuickBooks and Beyond blog, as well as his California Wildflower Hikes blog.
Connect with Charlie at Google
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Worked great!!! Only issue I found was PC with XP SP3 did not react weel to changing to large fonts via chaning the display setting and chaing the font per you method to 12 point. Any thoughts?
Steve, hard to say, I’d have to see things to say much more. So many variables…
God Bless you! Great tip
Thank you very much,we’ve been trying to get the text larger for sometime. Much easier on my eyes. Your instructions were easy to follow and worked great
THIS WORKED GREAT THANKS FOR YOUR HELP.
FANTASTIC SUGGESTION–I’m cancelling my eye appointment!
GOD BLESS YOU CHARLIE RUSSELL
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANKS YOU!!!
Ever since I upgraded to QuickBooks 2010 and purchased a 27″ monitor I have struggled with the display font size. I knew how to change it in printed reports – but needed larger fonts for the program itself. I am thrilled I found your post and can’t wait to look through your other tips. If you have an entry for how to set QuickBooks to self reconcile accounts, I will owe you dinner!
Charles, explain what you mean by “self reconcile”?
Thank you Charlie, this will make a big difference for my husband and I both!! Bless your heart!!
God Bless you, what a world of difference. Thank you so very much. These tired old eyes love it.
Many thanks for the help – much appreciated. I have an old lady who does the QB, and she’s going to love you.
This is great… however, doesn’t seem to to be the same for QB 2012. Is there a different ini file to configure? Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Jeff, I just tested this with Enterprise V12 (the 2012 release) and it worked fine. Note that in my QBW.INI file there wasn’t a “FontName” or “FontSize” attribute already – but I was able to add them (you have to format them exactly as shown above) and save the file, and restarted QB, and it worked. I didn’t try Premier 2012, but it should perform the same.
Thank you soooo much! My eyes sooooo happy today and for the rest of my bookkeeping/accounting days. =)Bless your heart.
I love you–and I don’t even know you! What a huge help this has been. I can move a little more quickly on budget work. Thank you. Thank you.