MS Project Graphical Problem - 'Ghost' lines appearing on plot, but not on screen.

Question

This problem has been plaguing our planners who have no idea what is causing it, and out IT department is also at a loss.

We have been experiencing an odd graphical problem when printing within Project to large size paper (generally A1 or larger), usually with projects of 100 items or more, which includes the vast majority of the work we do. 

The problem is rather difficult to explain. What apears to be long green 'ghost' lines appear in the bottom 1/3 or so of the print, that are not shown on screen within Project and should not be present during plotting. This occurs regardless of the printer; it occurs within both PDF prints and to the large plotter (DesignJet 500). The fact that printing to PDF gives the same effect means this is not a hardware fault of our A0 plotter, and indeed the problem has been experienced by several different users using different physical printers and different computers.

Printing to more than one page usually gives this effect per page; i.e. the top 2/3 print OK, whilst the bottom 1/3 of the page will display the graphical anomaly. The ghost lines look almost like extensions of the timing bars of the actual project and make reading the actual data incredibly difficult.

I have an example .pdf which shows the error, but don't know the best way to attach it here.

If anyone would be able to shed some light on why this error is occuring we would be most appreciative. We are using MS Project 2007, and the problem has occured on different operating systems (Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc)

Answer 1

Hi David,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project forum:-)

Please see FAQ Item: 44.  Printing Problems

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at this web address:http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on:-)

Mike Glen

Project MVP

Answer 2

Hi,

File Menu, Options, Advanced, Display Group, there is the 3D option.

Greetings,

Answer 3

The same problem appear in a Project 2010 Standard. In the Ribbon we don't have the option to turn off the 3d gantt bars..... so what can we do?

Answer 4

You're welcome, David :-)

Mike Glen

MS Project MVP

See  http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for my free Project Tutorials

Answer 5

Brilliant! We turned off displaying the Gantt bars as 3D elements and it has fixed the problem. Our planner is ecstatic, this issue has been bugging him for months. It's also had the side effect of making plotting to PDF much quicker.

Many thanks for the swift reply :)