Fixing an Excel 2004 printing bug under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Symptom: Excel 2004 spreadsheets don’t appear correct under print preview, and print only blank pages.

Remediation: On some machines, there is a problem with the “high” print resolution. In order to get the spreadsheet to print properly, go to File -> Page Setup. The last drop down is for “Print Quality.” If it is set to “High,” pick another setting like 300dpi or 600dpi. Then try print preview again — it should work.

We had this issue on one machine running Mac OS X 10.5.1 Leopard and Excel 2004 11.3.7, and it took a while to run it down. It is unclear if this is an Excel bug or a Leopard bug.

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
3 replies
  1. Nigel Cheshire
    Nigel Cheshire says:

    Thanks for the helpful tip, Alan. I’d been puzzling over that one for a while. Now, if you could explain why my keyboard periodically stops working in Excel under Leopard, I’d be a great shape!

  2. Alan Zeichick
    Alan Zeichick says:

    I have that problem too sometimes. Moving the mouse to another window and typing there seems to solve the problem. Sadly, it’s not repeatable enough for me to isolate it. Perhaps the 10.5.2 update, due any day now, will fix it.

  3. sean
    sean says:

    Thank you for this tip. We have had this Excel problem prior to Leopard but our symptoms were somewhat different. When we printed, the numbers would not line up in the column grid. But it didn’t happen on every computer. Our business manager is delighted!

Comments are closed.