"Fixing" shading of rows problem

[Lee Harris]

I have a large mail merge document which creates baseball/football cards,
each page contains 20 cards, and a typical set has 16 pages for 320 cards.

I altered the format this year, to add alternate shading on the rows

To get all the data on the cards and lined up I use monospac821BT font, with
text ranging from 6 point up to 10 point.

My problem is that each card is a cell in a table (5 by 4 per page), but
within each card I have sub tables with various bits of card data.

It all looks fine in Word, but when I print it to PDF, it doesnt come out
the same - the rows are bunched tighter, such that they slightly overlap and
because of the grey shading on alternate rows, this is blocking out some
text on the white rows.

I've no idea why the PDF isnt coming out "as is" - the page setup is correct
in Word with some smaller margins for A4, if I change the margin options on
PDF print, it is better, but still not correct


Anyway, It takes ages to go back and restart the merge, I would have to
delete all the cells bar the first one, edit the shading and then copy/paste
cells/rows to get the 320 cells filled in again

I can't work out how to get rid of the shading "in one go" and can't find an
option like in Excel where I could cheat by setting the light grey colour to
white for this document, at least that would get rid of the shading and even
if the text is bunched up, it will be OK for what I need

any help/advice would be gratefully received

cheers
LeeH

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It would probably be helpful to have the Adobe PDF printer selected as the
active printer when you create the file in Word.

 

[Lee Harris]

It would probably be helpful to have the Adobe PDF printer selected as the
active printer when you create the file in Word.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

Not sure what you mean - that is what is selected, how else does it create a
PDF? I have selected the correct Adobe PDF printer.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Do you have that printer selected *while* you are creating the document? For
example, in my Word I have my desktop printer (the default Windows printer)
set as the active printer, but when I click "Convert to Adobe PDF"
presumably the Adobe PDF printer is used?

 

[Lee Harris]

Do you have that printer selected *while* you are creating the document?
For
example, in my Word I have my desktop printer (the default Windows
printer)
set as the active printer, but when I click "Convert to Adobe PDF"
presumably the Adobe PDF printer is used?

Hi Suzanne,
I understand that many problems are caused by overlooking obvious errors,
but please believe me that I am selecting the correct printer. I am not
using "convert to PDF", I am selecting File->Print from within word and
selecting the Adobe PDF Printer. This is the only way to create PDFs the way
I do them. If I have the wrong printer selected, it does not come out as a
PDF file - this is not my problem, I assure you. I'd be happy to send a
trimmed down doc and/or pdf for you to see for yourself the problem.

In any case, the fix I need is just to get rid of the alternate shading on
rows within sub tables inside the cells of a very large table without having
to rebuild the table from scratch. I'm bemused that there seems to be no
"Tools->Options->Colours" setting as per excel

cheers,
Lee

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Not to belabor the point, but is the Adobe PDF printer set as your Windows
default printer? If it is not, then it is *not* the active printer in Word
unless you have selected it before working on the document. This is relevant
when creating documents to be printed from a different printer, but probably
not the issue in this case (since the whole idea of PDFs is to print exactly
what you would get if you printed to the default printer). Still, it is one
more conceivable factor.

In any case, you seem to be asking how to get rid of the shading at this
point. If this were one continuous table, you could just select the entire
table and remove the shading, but if this has been created as a "label" type
merge, then every sheet is going to be a separate section and hence a
separate table. A macro would make quick work of this, but unfortunately I'm
not a coder. What you might try, since you've got just 16 pages, is this.
Select the table on the first page (by clicking on the table handle in Print
Layout view), go to Format | Borders and Shading (or use the Shading Color
button on the Tables and Borders toolbar) and set the shading to No Fill.
Then set the browse object to Table, go to the next table, select it, and
press F4.