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Last month, a colleague came across an interesting issue with a Microsoft Word table.
Here’s an extract of what he had on his screen:
Notice the regular white space inside the table cells – well, they don’t actually appear in the on-line version of the document or the print preview…only in the printed copy.
So, troubleshooting this, we tried:
- a different printer – no change
- another different printer, this time a different make – no change
- re-applying the shading to the cells – no change
The [quick] solution ended up being as simple as creating a new blank document and a little bit of cut’n'paste.
Has anybody seen a similar issue? Was there a better resolution?
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11:41 am on February 10th, 2006 1
Sounds like Word might have been formatting on screen and for the print preview with a different set of print metrics than it was using for the printout. The effect that your choice of default printer has on how a word document lays itself out can produce some pretty weird behaviour at times. There is an article at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm which gives a couple of tips that might have helped.
In fact the whole of the Word MVP site is well worth a look if you feel like you’re fighting Word a lot of the time, as it contains a wealth of information on how Word actually works internally, and how some of the ways people often use the app interact with the way Word works to result in the common frustrations that a lot of people encounter.
It has to be said that after having read a lot of the stuff on that site, it has changed how I actually use Word when writing documents. For example before having looked at the site I tended to work in either normal or print layout, now I primarily use the outline view, I also tend to be a lot more careful about using styles, and especially using the various numbering and bulleting options. (If you want to really give yourself a headache have a read of the article explaining how Word’s numbering works at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm)