Excel 2007 - Some text in embedded charts does not appear upon print

[kettelfish]

I have a workbook built in Excel 2007 that has one sheet with a bunch of data and another with seven embedded pie charts summarizing the aforementioned data. The charts are arranged to print on three pages (3, 3, 1) and display beautifully both on-screen and in print preview. However, when they are printed, some of the chart titles, data labels, legend entries and text box text become invisible. I've tried printing on several different (all HP) printer models AND to Adobe (pdf), and the problem seems to be universal.


Symptoms of the problem: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>

• The problem has only appeared recently; charts from this file printed fine around a month ago. <o></o>
• First chart on first or second page - all text is invisible. <o></o>
• The second chart on first or second page is missing the chart title, all but the first series' data labels and all but the last legend text. Text in a text box appears. <o></o>
• Third chart on page has everything. <o></o>
• Chart on its own page has everything. <o></o>
• The word "invisible" above is important in that in the pdf prints, the text is still there and selectable and can be copied and pasted, but just doesn't show. <o></o>
• Printing each chart individually using the Selected Chart radio button on the Print dialog solves the problem (but is not visually pleasing). <o></o>
• Printing the file after opening in Excel 2003 or 2010 appears to solve the problem (most of us don't have 2003 anymore and haven't upgraded to 2010). <o></o>
• Doing a "Save As..." to PDF and printing from the resulting file appears to solve the problem (most of us don't have the full version of Acrobat). <o></o>
• On printing to Adobe, changing the Page Setup Print quality option to less than the 600 dpi option appears to solve the problem (again, most of us don't have the full version of Acrobat). Increasing the quality causes more information to disappear. <o></o>

At this point, my assumption is that this problem is caused by some MS patch because it occurs regardless of printer but not in versions of Excel other than 2007. I've seen another file, created by a different person on a different computer that appears to have the same issue, so I'm concerned that this problem is soon going to balloon. I've searched around the internet and the MS Knowledgebase for similar problems and have come up with no viable solution.

Any feedback or solutions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

--Kettel

 

[kettelfish]

We're still seeing this problem after a couple MS Office updates. I'm somewhat concerned that I can't find that anyone else on the entire internet is having this problem, but that I can replicate it on every computer running Excel 2007 that I've tried. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Gerald Higgins]

I had a similar problem recently (and posted here about it a few days ago ).
I'm not certain it's exactly your problem, but it might be.
Check out this link
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=606163

 

[kettelfish]

Yes, I'm having the same problem and yes, changing the fill for the chart area to "No fill" works for me too. Thank you so much Gerald!

What I don't understand is why embedding a chart into a sheet using the default settings would cause text to be occluded like this. Or why it only happens when you print. Or why the text would be occluded differently depending on where on the page a chart is printed. I can't think of any reason I would ever want the background of my chart to print in front of my legend and there's (apparently) no way to bring parts of the chart to the front.

I guess these are just undocumented "features" of the fabulous MS Office 2007 Suite!

Thanks again, Gerald!

--Kettel

 

[Gerald Higgins]

I can only think that this is an unintentional bug. For years now, Excel has been running more or less on the WYSIWYG principle, but this is a clear example of wysiwyDg

 

[uncle-nick]

Have seen the same problem on freshly-patched Office2007 [Win7 and XP]

Have also established that the missing content will print if Page Setup / Show Gridlines is ticked.... most peculiar

Would be good to identify the Office patch that introduces this foolish behaviour; will have to build a vanilla office2007sp3 box and work through updates. When the 20-hour day gets introduced !

Uncle

 

[Hayday]

I have just the same problem with Excel 2007 and WIN7.

A few weeks ago all worked well so the problem must have aroused together with some updates. But which of them? WIN 7? Office 2007? Acrobat 9.0?

Now upper half of the page i.e. first 4 charts (of the total six charts on the same page) has invisible headings and axis titles. When previewing the page the headings and axis titles are there but the problem appears when printing the page either by Adobe pdf or any other printer.

My (temporary) solution is to carry the files to my old computer with Excel 2007 and Win XP (both non-updated) for printing.

Hopefully the problem is soon resolved by another update!

 

[Fireplace33]

I have exactly the same problem as expertly described by Kettlefish.

Changing the fill color of the graph and the legend to "none" and moving the legend to the top of the graph helped me. (THANKS)

I also removed the grid lines in the excel spreadsheet , so they were not visible "under" the graph.

Would be good to get a correction update from Microsoft for this!

I'm using office 2007 and Vista enterprise 32 on a HP 6930p laptop, printing to a HP laser printer

 

[MoonUnit]

Everyone who uses Excel should be aware of this - the disappearance of graph legends and axis labels is down to a security patch Microsoft released in December 2011 - hence why we've all discovered this anomaly recently.

The following post discusses the problem:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...y/thread/c886f2af-24e4-4560-a644-dbc2ff279018

All you need to do is uninstall security patch KB2596596 from Add/Remove programs in Control Panel.

I've spent half a day thinking I had problems with my printer, only to discover this. Doh!

 

[Hayday]

Thank you MoonUnit!

It's nice to have an uncomplicated solution to a complicated problem.

Your answer saved me a lot of trouble. Thank you once again!