Accidentally color-printed an often-used Word 2003 .doc that contains a table.
I was gobsmacked to find that each horizontal line between the cells has a pale blue shading.



Reason I just discovered this is that I usually print this doc in black from a mono laser printer, and I'd put the faint grey shading down to a vagary of the old HP laser.

Note: When the doc is on screen, there's no shading visible

I'm absolutely baffled . Anyone have a clue on this?

I'll try and attach a page scan.

Thanks for reading.

Attached Images

IMG_20180115_0003.jpg (181.0 KB, 32 views)

Your table appears to have bottom borders that use one of the artistic effects available via the Table Tools|Design>Draw Borders>Line Style dropdown. Changing back to the fine line border format should suffice to revert them to the std lines.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks Paul, I'll check it out today and report back.

Later: Sadly, no. I tried 20 or 30 combinations of line, no line, line styles, grid on, grid off, borders on,off, etc etc.

There's nothing in any of the settings that's different from several other tables-within-docs that I use.

Is there a deeper analysis of each doc hidden in the computer somewhere?

Like a developer code, if you know what I mean.

Cheers

Can you post a copy of the table with no text?

cyberpaper: Simply editing your previous reply meant that I wasn't notified of an update to the thread until kilroy replied.

As it is, it's not apparent from your reply that you used the Table Tools|Design>Draw Borders>Line Style dropdown to modify the line style.

In any event, it would be easier to diagnose the issue if you supplied a copy of the actual table, as kilroy suggests, rather than a screenshot.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for your response.
I saved one page as a doc in its own right.
Would this be OK?

Edit: As I said earlier, the doc looks perfectly normal on-screen. It's only when it's printed that the shading shows up. Pale blue in color or a pale grey in mono laser.

Attached Files

Tweak-1page.doc (50.5 KB, 20 views)

I don't have a physical printer installed, so I printed to a pdf instead. I see no pale blue shading artifacts there. That suggests one of two things:
1. A faulty printer driver; or
2. A corrupt document and/or table.

Corrupt documents can often be 'repaired' by inserting a new, empty, paragraph at the very end, copying everything except that new paragraph to a new document based on the same template (headers & footers may need to be copied separately), closing the old document and saving the new one over it. With a mailmerge main document, you'd also need to re-connect to the data source and re-apply any filtering.

Similarly, corrupt tables (which the above process won't repair) can often be 'repaired' by:
• converting the tables to text and back again;
• cutting & pasting them to another document that you save the document in RTF format, which you then close then re-open before copying them back to the source document; or
• saving the document in RTF format, closing the document then re-opening it and re-saving in the doc(x) format.

Do note that some forms of table corruption can only be repaired by the first method.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks macropod.

I think it's corruption of some kind, rather than a printer issue. I use 3 printers (2 color, 1 laser mono) and haven't had any unusual results from other docs or texts.

I'd tried converting table to text and back but that resulted in a mess, so I reset.

The RTF suggestion sounds interesting. Not sure I understand the 'new, empty paragraph' method. I'll have to think about it. Duh.

I've just had another thought. I've been comparing docs 'side-by-side' of late and it's just occurred to me that I could open my bad doc alongside another one with an identical but empty table. The other one could be prepared in another of my computers that also runs Word 2003.

Then I could just copy\paste the text from each cell of the bad one to the new one.

Feasible?

That would probably be OK; just don't copy the end-of-cell markers.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

End-of-cell markers?
Wow, that sounds ominous :-)
Sorry, I don't even know what these are, let alone how to avoid duplicating them.
Or what would happen if I did copy one (or more).
Can you flesh that out a bit, please?

If you click on the ¶ symbol on the Ribbon's Home tab so that Word displays its formatting marks, each table cell will be seen to terminate with the '¤'symbol. That's a table's end-of-cell or end-of-row marker.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks, Paul. But I'm using Word 2003

In Word 2003, you'd click on the ¶ symbol on the toolbar to toggle Word's formatting mark display.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Got it. So you're saying, 'Copy each 'cluster' of text in each cell (for pasting into another new table's cell), but don't copy the end-of-cell markers?

What happens if the markers are copied?

If you copy the end-of-cell markers, Word will probably insert a paragraph break there in the destination table cell - possibly along with whatever formatting is attached to those markers (and, if that includes the funny shading, you don't want that...).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]