Excel Shadow Prints over text

Question

Hi everyone,

Since office 365 update, I have a problem printing an excel sheet.  When I insert a shadow under a cell and try to print the sheet, the shadow appears as a black bar or black rectangle in front of the text.  I've tried different printer and printing as PDF to, so I know it's not a printer problem.  I've have tried it on several computers too and I always have the same problem.  I think that Excel create a black rectangle, offsets it and send it in the back of the layers so it appears as a Shadow.  However, when I print the sheet it comes in the front, hiding whatever is under it.  Never had problem with this before update.

Anyone as encountered this?

Thanks,

Guillaume

Answer 1

Hello Guillaume,

Thank you for the update. As you said the issue does not occur in Print Preview and also that it appears only in old .xls files and not new ones, it seems to be some sort of a an issue with respect to the old files itself.

To resolve the issue you may only have to work-around the issue by copying and pasting the contents to a new Excel file.

Let us know if you need any other information or assistance.

Thank you.

Answer 2

I've tried opening the file in safe mode but still no change.  The isue doesn't appear in print preview.  I've found something interesting though : the problem is only happening in old excel files that we use since a long time. I've tried copying all cells (ctrl+a, ctrl+c) in another sheet and it's working.  I have hundreds of them so it would take a while to set all sheets one by one. The file was in .xls at first and I tried converting it to .xlsx, but it didn't work.

Answer 3

Hello Guillaume,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

To resolve this issue we need more information. Let us know the following.

Have you checked if this issue appears in Print Preview? Check in Print Preview if Excel is printing the shadow.

You may also try opening Excel in the Safe Mode and check if the issue persists or resolves.

To open Excel 2013/Excel 2016 in the Safe Mode please follow the steps as shown on the following Microsoft Resource article.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/why-cant-i-start-my-office-2013-application-HA104011864.aspx

Check if you were able to print shadow in Excel 2016 normally. If yes, then follow the next set of steps mentioned in the article to troubleshoot Add-ins in Excel 2013/2016 to resolve the issue.

Try the above steps and let us know if you need further assistance, or provide us with the exact error message.

Thank you.