I have a couple of tables in a Word document that originated in Excel. I copied the tables from Excel into Word and reformatted them to a house style. Those tables contain blank rows. In the printed hard copy, those blank rows were suppressed (i.e., did not print), meaning the the electronic copy and the hard copy did not match. As a quick workaround, I added a space in one cell of each row to get the blank rows to print.

After some extensive googling and reviewing the xml code of my document, I discovered the cause is the <w:hideMark /> element.

Is there some cell formatting in the original Excel file that causes this <w:hideMark /> to appear? It is random in that it only affects some tables. Other tables I copied from Excel into my MS Word document printed as they appeared.



I've spent hours researching this, and I'm still at a loss. I'm hoping an expert, here, can provide an explanation.

Let's assume that Yes, it is possible that you introduced this setting from the Excel source.

Without seeing the source Excel file, it would probably be a hit and miss activity to identify the feature of that particular content that introduces the xml tag to your Word document. Can you post an Excel example that when copy/pasted into Word produces this anomaly?

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hey, Andrew.

Thank you for responding to my post. My apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Unfortunately, I cannot post the source Excel file. It contains company-confidential information. I could try to santize it, but I would not want you to waste your time on this. A coworker and I spent an entire work day trying countless different settings in Excel and in Word, different paste options, etc. In the end, we could not decide whether it is an issue or simply a function of how Word interprets, if you will, the Excel table.

This issue only came to my attention because a table, which on screen spread across two pages, printed onto one page except for one line. This threw off my page count and document layout; otherwise, I would have been none the wiser. The simplest fix is to add a space into any cell in the blank row. You can also select the row (without the end-of-row marker) and check/uncheck the Specify height option (Row tab of the Table Properties dialog box).

Again, thank you for responding to my help request. You have been a tremendous help to me in the past with working through Word VBA and macros.

Have a great day, Andrew!