Problem solved! Here's the "trick" (though it probably looks
obvious to many of you!).

When you copy a, Excel chart or part of a chart, you're also
copying the attributes of the printer that the file was pointed
to.

This explains why we sometimes got the red to appear in the
Word doc we pasted the Excel file into, and sometimes not.
Our b&w network laser printer was selected in the Print
box of the Excel file we were copying.

When we did c&p on the Excel chart that was and pasted
it into a Word doc. it showed up all black. When we went
back to the source Excel file, changed the printer setting
to a color printer, thn did a c&p and pasted into Word, it
showed up and printed in color!