I’ve got a weird little glitch in an Excel spreadsheet that occurs when I try to print it, and it’s driving me crazy.
The spreadsheet has 13 tabs, labeled “Pg 1”, “Pg 2”…etc.
Pg 3 has the usual cells with text, and charts and stuff, and a little text box in the lower left, containing some footnote information.
When I print, Pg 4 and Pg 5 have that text from the text box superimposed smack in the middle, on top (or underneath) the charts and stuff, making it hard to read.
As far as I can tell, the verbiage in that text box appears nowhere else in the workbook. And what’s weird – if I delete that text box, I still get the verbiage superimposed when I print.
It only appears during printing (or Print preview) – pg 4 and pg 5 display perfectly fine on screen. I’ve looked for Print Areas, and Print Titles, and hidden cells and columns, and have found nothing.
so I’ve got a ghost embedded in my workbook somewhere. How do I track it down and exorcise it?
Test one: change the wording in the text box on page 3, and then see if the new text shows up when you print pages 4-5. This will confirm whether the problem is in the text box you’re seeing (i.e., that it is somehow inexplicably being replicated elsewhere) or if in fact there are copies of it hidden somewhere on pages 4-5.
Found it! That F5 thing is pretty cool – never used that before. But that wasn’t it.
Pg 4 and Pg 5 have charts that are picture objects, linked to data on hidden worksheets. Those hidden worksheets had the ghostly text box. Apparently the embedded chart was referencing an area a bit too broad on the hidden worksheet. I just deleted the text box from the hidden worksheet, and poof! gone.
What’s interesting is that I used the Find feature to search for the text string, and it couldn’t find it – apparently it can’t peek inside text boxes. If it had found all instances of that string, I would’ve solved this pretty easily.
and the change does not show up on pages 4-5. So there is another copy of this text box buried somewhere else.