Loss of colour information in linked Excel tables

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At work, I have a number of Word documents with linked Excel tables
(paste special of named ranges, paste link, picture (windows
metafile)). The tables have cells with fills in various shades of
blue, and use fonts in dark blue, 'gold', and white.

On printing, some of these tables reduce the fonts to just black and
white while keeping the blues in the cell fills while others retain
all the colour information.

I've tried re-linking some of the tables, even though I can't see any
obvious differences in the ways they were originally linked. The
paragraphs to which the tables are attached are all formatted
identically. All table fonts retain their colour in print preview, but
those that end up in black and white do so in both Adobe Acrobat (the
intended destination) and our colour laser printer.

I've run out of ideas now and I'd be very grateful for any guidance.

 

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I should perhaps have added: Office 2003 SP1, on XP professional 5.1