PowerPoint/Excel twilight zone (2000 SR-1)

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My Ppt is version 9.0.4527, my Excel is version 9.0.4402. Certain ppt slides, but not all, with Excel charts in them do not print correctly. A bar chart may print much larger than is viewed on the screen (so it doesn’t fit on the page correctly) and a pie chart may not print round, but as a distorted oval (even though the specs in “format object” indicate that it is round). This happens with 3 printers in my office, one of which is only a couple of years old. These charts print correctly from a computer with EXACTLY the same versions of Excel and PowerPoint, and exactly the same print drivers … therefore, the problem seems to only happen with my computer. I isolated the problem charts into a separate document and took the background colors out, but the problem persists. The technicians who come in and “take care of” our computer problems now think there might be a problem with my registry, and that my computer should either be replaced or have the hard drive wiped out and everything reinstalled. I really hope I don’t have to do this … my Word is very customized and I don’t want to have to do it all over again (would it at least be safe to keep my old normal.dot and bring it into a new loading of Word?). Would it possibly help to just reinstall Excel and/or PowerPoint? HELP!!

Bobbie

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This is one I haven’t heard of, but I’d start with reinstalling the printer drivers as opposed to reinstalling Excel/PPT (which probably won’t help). Sometimes drivers become corrupt, so it’s worth a try and is less painful than some of the other solutions the techs are proposing!

Also, in Excel, go to Page Setup and on the chart tab, check the settings under printed chart size.

By the way, are your charts linked or embedded?

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The print drivers have been reinstalled a number of times. Besides, the problem happens on all three of the printers I use. The charts are embedded, not linked. In Excel page setup/chart, “full page” is checked.

A potentially frightening development just today … before this, I had never had this same problem with my Word tables in PowerPoint, but as of today, they are starting to get wacked out in terms of the sizing … it’s as if someone stretched the table out, usually disproportionately, but of course on the screen it’s fine (as is the case sometimes, but not always in PPT), so I just have someone else print out the document for me. However, when I added these problem slides to a PPT document of “problem” slides and printed the whole thing again, I found that what gets screwed up isn’t necessarily consistent from one printout to the next.

Bobbie

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Wow, I’m stumped. This isn’t something I’ve seen, nor can I find anything that seems relevant when searching through Google groups.

If you right-click one of the embedded charts or tables and go to Format, what percentages show on the size tab?

Anybody else got any ideas?

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