XL: Dithered Cell Patterns Printed Incorrectly on PCL Printers

• Microsoft Excel for Windows, versions 3.x, 4.x, 5.0, 5.0c
• Microsoft Excel for Windows 95, versions 7.0

SYMPTOMS

When you use a PCL (printer control language) printer to print a Microsoft Excel worksheet that contains no OLE objects, cells that you format with a sparsely dithered cell pattern will be printed incorrectly. Cells formatted with different dithered patterns may be displayed correctly in Print Preview, but they will be printed incorrectly with the same sparsely dithered pattern.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs when the following conditions are met:

• You use a PCL (non-PostScript) printer.

  -and-

• You print a worksheet that contains cells that you format with a dithered pattern.

  -and-

• The worksheet does not contain an object.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, force the graphical device interface (GDI) to send the dithering information to the printer. To do this, place an object on the worksheet. To prevent the object from being printed, select the object and set the pattern fill and border to None before you print the worksheet. To do this, use the following steps:

1. Click Toolbars on the View menu and select Drawing if the Drawing toolbar is not already selected.

2. Click the Rectangle tool on the Drawing toolbar.

3. Position the insertion point on the worksheet that contains the cells with the dithered pattern, and then drag to place a rectangle on the worksheet.

   NOTE: The rectangle can be any size.

4. With the rectangle selected, click Object on the Format menu.

5. Click the Patterns tab.

6. Set both the Border and Fill options to None.

7. Click OK.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Excel for Windows 95, version 7.0a.