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General discussion

The mysterious Word 2002 disappearing table columns trick

by oketex Mar 1, 2006 11:50PM PST

I have a table in a Word 2002 doument (on XP) that has the peculiar ability to become partly invisible! Within a large document, which is laid out in portrait, there are several pages of tables, which are shifted to landscape. No problem setting up, but here's the trouble.

The right side of the table will disappear onscreen, as well as when printed or PDF'd. The last few inches on the right side of the document seem to disappear under a masking layer, which approximates the right border of the portrait pages. As I shift the table left or right, the table displays more or less info, but always only to the invisible line.

I've deleted my "normal" file - no change. I've removed section breaks and paragrahs, looking for a corrupt one - no change. I've recreated the table in another document countless times and ways (from scratch, pasted without formatting, imported to, and then from Excel, placed as OLE) and brought it back to the main doc, still with the same results.

Any ideas?

Discussion is locked

3 Posts
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Try ...
by Kees Bakker Mar 2, 2006 12:26AM PST

saving as rtf, then reopening and save as doc.

The idea is that rtf saves everything, except corruption. Worth a try (but keep the old document!).

Kees

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Success!
by oketex Mar 2, 2006 12:44AM PST

After saving as .rtf, then back to .doc, I did a quick conversion to PDF. Looks like it worked! Thanks for the tip, Kees.

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I'm not sure of it.
by Kees Bakker Mar 2, 2006 3:02AM PST

It could just as well have been a printer (hardware or driver) problem and you circumvent both by 'printing' to pdf. I'm only convinced if
a) the OLD document shows this erroneous behavior also in the pfd-file and on any other computer you have access to (mail the document to a friend or your work)
and
b) the NEW document prints correctly on paper.

In fact, I logged in to tell you the above, and I'm more or less surprised my tip seems to have solved the problem.

Kees

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