Page setup changes on different machines

[riaz]

I wonder if anyone has come across this problem. I have done a quick search of the forum but I am probably not phrasing the query correctly as I get too many unrelated hits.

I set up a spreadsheet for use by my colleagues, on an Acer 17 inch portable. My colleagues all use HP or Dell with 15 inch monitors (and different graphics cards to mine). They all complained that when they opened my sheet, the page breaks were all in the wrong place. When they fixed the breaks on their machines and I opened those file, the breaks were now in the wrong place on mine, but were all right on theirs.

I have now "upgraded" to a Toshiba 17 inch laptop, and find that my original spreadsheet done on the Acer 17 inch shows page breaks in the wrong place on my new machine.

Is this something to do with display adaptors? If so, does anyone know what I can do to standardise this across the board? (My boss uses a 20 inch screen, and the sheet for him is even more wildly out).

Thanks for reading.
Riaz

 

[RoryA]

Page breaks are a printer issue, not a monitor one. If you are all using the same printer and printer driver, your page breaks ought to appear in the same place.

 

[riaz]

Rorya, thanks for that. This is what puzzles me, as we all have the same printer driver and print to the same printer. I have tried printing to 4 different printers, and with my machine the pages are all correct, but the same 4 printers from the other machines break the pages in different places to mine (but as they are identical machines, they all break in the same "wrong" places). Frustrating, as we all have to spend the first few minutes on opening the files to move the page breaks.

Kind regards

 

[RoryA]

Are you all using the same version of Excel and Windows?

 

[riaz]

Actually, I have just noticed that I have Excel 2002 SP3. One of my colleagues who inherited my old laptop also acquired the same Excel, and she no longer has this problem. My three other colleagues and my boss do not have SP3 for Excel and have this problem. I will now explore this possibility by upgrading one of them to SP3 and see if that is the cause, and if so, go that route for everyone. If not, its back to the drawing board.

Thank you for that pointer. Its funny how one takes the obvious for granted. I never realised that we were running different sub-versions of the same Excel.

Kind regards

 

[riaz]

Update Re: Page setup changes on different machines

I have now narrowed this down. My laptop has a higher screen resolution than the others. One user also has a higher resolution than the others, but lower than mine. When I changed the screen resolution for all the users to the same (1024 x 768), the sheets behaved perfectly. When we use different resolutions, Excel changes the margins in PageSetup.

I now know what. I need to know why? Any thought, anyone?

 

[RoryA]

Re: Update Re: Page setup changes on different machines

I have to confess that makes no sense to me! Does this happen with all workbooks? Do you have any controls from the Control Toolbox or Forms toolbar added to this sheet?

 

[LaOs]

I am incredibly interested in how this issue plays out, as I have a similar one that has me frustrated and I can't seem to resolve.

(Unfortunately, I don't have anything to addto your problem, riaz.)

 

[riaz]

Okay, it seems I led you up the garden path with my last post about the resolutions. I tested this on all the machines except the one that originally created the spreadsheets, which is why everything looked hunky dory when the resolutions were made the same.

I have now narrowed this down. The machine that originally created the spreadsheets defaults to a row height of 22 pixels if you create a new worksheet. All the other machines have a default row height of 17 pixels. When the spreadsheets are created on the 22pixel machine and ported to any other machine, the files open on the other machines with row heights of 17pixels. This is what is causing the imbalance on the page setup.

Now to find out why that particular machine (Acer Aspire 9410) behaves differently with Excel. Even my new Toshiba with a very high resolution defaults to a row height of 17pixels.

Anyone know how to change the default row height?

 

[RoryA]

I would guess it is down to the default font size (and possibly name)