Adjusting Tile Size In Metro

Since Metro was made primarily for touchscreen devices, navigation is – at the very least – slightly awkward for people using a mouse and keyboard. This is especially true when regarding the tiles and horizontal scrolling features, and also true when using multiple monitors to take advantage of such features. Here is a small exercise you can do: Right-click the “Mail” tile. A check mark should form on its upper left corner.

An “options” bar should appear on the bottom of your screen, like this:

The rest is pretty much self-explanatory. The tiles can only be resized into two sizes: small and large. The tile shown above is large, so you can only make it smaller. You might not be able to do this to some tiles, such as the “Internet Explorer” tile. This is ironic, considering that you can do it to the “Desktop” one. Enjoy re-organizing your Metro tiles like you’ve always wanted!

Adjusting The Size Of Everything Altogether

If you’re like me and you love looking at everything from a huge flat screen in 1080p resolution, you probably hate how tiny Metro looks on it. The amplitude of screen space makes it, if ever possible, uglier. There’s probably one more reason to hate Metro – if you don’t know how to properly use it! So, there’s a solution for all the “giant screen junkies.” For this tutorial, you will need to access your Metro control panel. This is something very different from accessing the desktop version, although the method is similar. Metro’s control panel can only be opened within Metro. For those of you that don’t know how to open it, hover your mouse over the top right corner of the screen, allowing the charms bar to pop up. Click “Settings” and click “More PC Settings.” There you are! Get into “Ease of Access” and just turn the option for “Make everything on your screen bigger” on.

This certainly makes everything big!

Bonus Section: Did You Know You Can Do This?

Try holding your left mouse button over a tile on Metro and dragging it. Drag it all over the screen. If you notice, you can create artificial barriers to organize your app tiles. Once you let a tile go, it will fall wherever on the grid you put it. This way, you can have complete control over the tiles you have! If you have anything to ask about what we’ve discussed, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!