Displaying Excel charts in Word, IN COLOUR

[rob2k6]

I'm currently trying to display several MS Excel objects in a Word document, but am having strange issues with colour printing. Before I go any further, I should point out that the issue is not with the printer settings, as other colours in the document print fine.

1) I have a bar chart with solid red bars (which print in colour fine) and patterned blue bars (which display on screen correctly but print in greyscale). The chart is inserted as a link to the Excel file. The coloured text on the axes of the graph also print in greyscale.

2) I also have some schematic diagrams with calculated annotation, which use colour-coding to help the reader see what's going on. These are again pasted as links (into Word) from the Excel file. The colour-coding shows up fine on the screen, but does not print - it appears in greyscale.

Addendum: The colours all show up fine in Print Preview, it's just when the colour printer actually prints the document out that some of the colours disappear.

 

[Bill_Biggs]

Actually, the problem could be the printer not having the range of colors that Excel has. I went to Help a while back and entered the PatternColorIndex Property. It showed the color spectrum that Excel 2003 works in (the standard colors, 57 as I recall) . I printed the chart shown but the print job applied grayscale to several of the boxes, making it look very different from what was on my screen. Try entering the phrase in help, and printing the Index colors, and see if that happens to you as well.

 

[rob2k6]

Thanks for the help, but I don't think that's the problem here - as one of the colours that doesn't print is the standard red: which prints fine on my bar graph, but NOT in the other schematics (but it's the same Excel colour red in both cases).

 

[Cindy Ellis]

We've been seeing a similar problem where I work. The only work-around we've been able to come up with is to copy/paste as an image rather than a link. Other odd behavior we've noticed since switching recently to 2007 is that some smoothed lines in charts that are on their own chart sheet seem to disappear completely when printed. Changing to an un-smoothed line allowed it to print.
Hope this helps,
Cindy

 

[rob2k6]

I might try that then, thanks Cindy. The only problem with doing that in the first place was that any updates to my graphs then have to be manually copied in to the Word document again.
Oh well, such is life with microsoft products ...