Alignment woes

[square_cube]

I have used excel Vx for some time and recently upgraded to 2004. This
has brought an unexpected problem which I am unable to resolve.

On the screen data in cells appear aligned as expected, but when
printed the data in any cell which has right alignment is printed about
1cm to the right of the column where it should have been.

This applies equally to printed output as well as to cells copied and
then pasted-as-picture in Word. When pasted normally into Word the
alignment of data in columns is correct.

Has anyone seen this before? and how might I reslove the issue?
Many thanks for any assistance.

james

OSX 10.3.9, Office 2004 with latest updater installed, font: arial
narrow 9 (though the issue is the same with any font), printer: hp
deskjet 990cxi

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi James -

Have you updated your printer driver since moving from X to 2004?

Did you use the Remove Office utility before installing 2004? Have you run
Repair Disk Permissions since th installation?

When you say "on the screen" do you mean in Normal View?... What about Print
Preview?

 

[square_cube]

Bob:

Thanks for the reply

No, I have not updated my printer driver

Yes, I have run disk permissions, but

No I did not use the remove office utility before installing. I was
under the impression that the 2 versions could co-exist. Am I wrong?

On screen = normal view, and this is errr normal !. Page layout view
is also ok. Print preview directly from the file menu is OK, but print
preview from the print dialogue box is all out of line.

regards

james

 

[CyberTaz]

There have been a number of similar problems reported, primarily involving
HP printers & generally the treatment is:

1) Make sure that your printer driver is up-to-date,
2) Make sure Office is fully updated,
3) Repair permissions as appropriate when any updates are installed, and
4) Change the print quality settings in Page Setup.

I've not tried to run Office X & 2004 concurrently. In fact the only reason
I got X was to expedite receipt of 2004 - I ditched X as soon as I received
'04... The reason being that X was a hastily contrived product developed on
a prototype of what OS X was "intended" to be. Quite frankly, I continued to
run 2001 in Classic for anything other than 'experimentation' with the new
OS X-flavored stuff. '04 is a much more stable & effective product, but
whether the 2 can peacefully coexist I can't honestly say. In theory it
should be possible but I would think they would have to be separate complete
installations. If '04 is instaled as an upgrade to X it may be a different
story. Perhaps someone else has better insight on that one.

 

[isidey]

James,

Last year, Bernard Rey, MVP, helped me with a cross platform printing
problem. He solved it for me by suggesting that I set Print Quality to
"High". (File, Print, Page Setup, Print Quality "High"). I suggest you
check this setting. It has solved problems for me multiple times.

Good luck!

Ian S.

 

[square_cube]

Bob / Ian

Thanks for your replies. Problem solved:

I looked at the print quality settings (File/Print/Page Setup/Print
Quality) and it was set at normal. Changing this high solved the
problem, and right aligned cells are now withing their columns. Phew.


Maybe I can now consider junking Vx. However, I have had reasonably
good experince with Vx, especially with Excel. Word was let down by
the lack of a portuguese dictionary (resolved in 2004), but was
otherwise useably stable. I find Powerpoint 2004 even less stable than
Vx (lots of crashes when editing) and am v frustrated by the fact that
detailed animation of elements in a slide get all messed up when going
from one version to the other. I have maintained for ages that PPoint
is one of the worst pieces of software that MS has ever made and it it
wasnt for the requirement to share stuff with windows using colleagues
I would have abandoned it long ago in favour of Apple's Keynote.

For anyone's further reference my set up is as follows:
OSx 10.3.9
Office 2004 with 11.30 updater installed
HP deskject 990cxi
Deskjet driver: 2.7.1
HP toolbox: 6.22

Thanks for your help again

Cheers
james