In posting this, I found the answer from Rowan Drummond from the 10/18/2005
posting.

Turning off "High Contrast" on my Display option did the trick.....so the
monitor settings was the real problem.

Thanks


"Sue Wiz" wrote:

I'm newly on XP and EXCEL 2003 from an antique computer and old Microsoft
versions.

I'm unable to view cell shading on the screen even though the "format cells,
patterns, cell shading, color" shows that it should be there.

It doesn't show for either new spreadsheets or existing ones (which had
shading for my input cells in prior EXCEL versions).

I've tried everything I can think of.........any suggestions? Is it EXCEL or
XP settings?