Disappearing Underlines

Question

Since we have started using Excel 2010 and 2013 we have experienced a problem with some of our spreadsheets.  We are an Accounting department and have some intense spreadsheets.  When we are ready to print these and go to the print preview all of our underlines and double underlines appear, but when we print the page they don't print.  This doesn't happen to all of our spreadsheets, in fact, within the same workbook some spreadsheets print just fine and others are missing the underlines.  Nothing else seems to be missing.  I have recently, discovered that it seems to be related to the page setup.  If we change the scaling on the pages we are having trouble with to 99%, then the underlines print.  Unfortunately, this doesn't really help, because we need to be able to get all the information on one page.  Is there some kind of a fix for this.

Thank you,

Heather

Answer 1

One of the more common reasons to see these weird printing artifacts is the printer driver. What type of printer are you using, and what printer driver? If you connect to a different model printer and print with the most up-to-date drivers available for that other printer, what happens? You can also use virtual print drivers to test, for example try printing to a PDF file from a 3rd party PDF creation program like Adobe and look at the resulting PDF (you might also try the built-in PDF export function, but I wouldn't rely on that as an end-all, beat-all analysis).

It was a different version of Excel, but we had a similar problem and our workaround was to print to a PDF, then print the PDF to our normal printer and got the expected hardcopy. Not ideal, but our expensive, large corporate MDF didn't have any drivers that actually worked with the nuanced formatting in our documents. Maybe if you find better results with a different printer you can just go that way instead.

Answer 2

I really don't think this is a driver problem but is internal to Excel. I recently encountered this problem within Excel 2016, which occurred whilst working within a workbook that had multiple sheets. All sheets used to print properly, then suddenly some sheets started missing the underlines. After much testing, I found that simply making a copy of the offending sheets (by right clicking on their tab) within the same workbook produced a version that printed properly. Totally weird!

Answer 3

Since we have started using Excel 2010 and 2013 we have experienced a problem with some of our spreadsheets.  We are an Accounting department and have some intense spreadsheets.  When we are ready to print these and go to the print preview all of our underlines and double underlines appear, but when we print the page they don't print.  This doesn't happen to all of our spreadsheets, in fact, within the same workbook some spreadsheets print just fine and others are missing the underlines.  Nothing else seems to be missing.  I have recently, discovered that it seems to be related to the page setup.  If we change the scaling on the pages we are having trouble with to 99%, then the underlines print.  Unfortunately, this doesn't really help, because we need to be able to get all the information on one page.  Is there some kind of a fix for this.

Thank you,

Heather

Hi Heather ,

You can Use the Under Line Border Instead of Simple Under Line.

Answer 4

Hi Keith,

Thank you for your help.  I had tried several different printers and drivers, but they all had the same problem.  However the printing to PDF first works!  Really appreciate this.

Thank you,

Heather