Excel Spreadsheets embedded into MS Word documents....

[Chemainiac]

We always embed Excel spreadsheets into Word documents when constructing our quarterly and annual financial statements. We have noticed a rather unpredictable aspect to this, in that sometimes the gridlines in excel appear in the printouts and sometimes they don’t. One solution we have uncovered is that if we double click into each table, then we get a clean printout without gridlines. We seem to have to do this every time we reopen the file.

Is there a better, more reliable fix?

[Jon Peltier]

Before embedding a sheet into the Word doc, do you go to page setup and choose the option not to print the gridlines?

Another option is to use paste link, and paste the worksheet at formatted text. This puts it into a Word table, linked to the Excel sheet. This might be friendlier to format in Word, and keep the document file size down.

[Chemainiac]

We could do the former but it does not explain the skittish behaviour of the embedded document...sometimes showing the visible lines and sometimes not. We like the lines in the sheet for looking across tables and wanted to avoid the pain of having to go in and uncheck the gridlines option for each embedded sheet.

We were hoping for a seamless approach but it may not exist and we will have to continue with our learned approach. The Deloitte documents team uses this approach as well and only stumbled upon it.

[Ken Puls]

I'm not sure if I can really add much to this discussion, as I've never worked with embedding Excel documents in to Word. (Should probably try it one day!)

On this though...

... it does not explain the skittish behaviour of the embedded document...

I'd agree. Unfortunately it's not the only place we see skittish behaviour either. I'd say that there is most likely a bug in the system somewhere, but the challenge is finding it if you can't reproduce the issue on demand. If you can, and you find the steps that cause it every time, then we can report it to Microsoft. If they can repro it, they may fix it.

Far from ideal, I know.

[Chemainiac]

Thanks to all. I will endeavour to recreate on demand....and I think I can.....then forward on to Microsoft and/or yourselves.