Cant seem to make an embedded object really transparent.

[John Keith]

I have 3 seperate workbooks that I have generated. 1 is a hexagonal map with
letter-number designations for each cell. I created a lot of hex auto shapes
then exactly lined them up and grouped them as 1 object on the first
workbook. The 2nd is small font text which represents a label for the
contents of a cell. The 3rd is a very large font arrow pointing to 1 of the
6 sides. The different size font was the reason I had to use this embed
object method (or the only feature in excel I could find that seemed to do
what I needed)

I am using Insert>Object "Create from file" with "Link to file" checked and
pulling each of these 3 workbooks into a new workbook. Then I use the
right-click to "format object" then in the "colors and lines" tab I set the
transparency to 100% on all 3 objects (scrolling through them with "send to
back")... 2 of them seem to merge... but 1 of them, even though set to 100%
transparent, will remain opaque. I have seen this work with 3 objects
before (I can make 3 simple new files to test this and it does work), but now
I cant figure out why, in my "real" files, 1 remains opaque. It is the one
with the arrows that seems to stay opaque. I am using these "↑↗↘↓↙↖" Arial
Unicode MS in font size 36 or so in 100x100 pixel cells.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do to fix this problem?
It seems to happen both on Excel2003 and 2000.

 

[John Keith]

Additional info...
The 3 workbooks that get inserted, all have grid lines turned off, and each
cell is 100x100 pixels where Cols A and B & Rows 1 and 2 are blank (no data
or formulas) Cell C3 is really the top left of the hex-grid.

I left the grid lines visible in the new workbook, When I insert each
object, I format to 100% transparent, then the grid lines appear on the
borders (so I think the object IS becoming transparent, however the locations
of the real data is what seems to remain opaque, and that is only for the 2
sheets that use formulas to put text (either large or small font) in a cell.
The hexmap file will go fully transparent and when I have just 1 of the other
2 overlayed objects... I can see the combination of the hex grid with some
text (arrows or small font text) but not both.
For just one of them to work however the hex-overlay must be the front
object (so this still fits with the problem that the "text" object overlays
just wont seem to go full transparent)