Print cell borders with special 'skin'
 

Since upgrading from Excel for Windows 95 I have experienced problems
trying to print borders of cells with finer lines than 1pt. Also, these
borders will not print in gray (grey) scale. I have read all the forum
postings and it seems this is a general problem with Excel 2003. I have
tried all the possible combinations and nothing works. Always seem to
get black lines and always no thinner than about 1pt. Excel for Windows
95 gave thin cell border lines lower than 0.25pt. I have also checked
all the printer settings, driver updates, settings for color and not
black and white etc. In the end I gave up and decided to find a way
around the problem.
If you remove all the cell borders and replace them with rectangles (I
can let you know an easy way to do this) you are then able to set the
rectangle outline grid as low as 0.25pt. Also if you set the color to
about 58% black you can achieve a line thickness even thinner. The
whole 'skin' of rectangles can be grouped together and the line
thickness and color changed as required. This can be saved as a
separate worksheet and copied / pasted as required.
It does mean that you have to set up a rectangle grid / skin for each
new worksheet layout but this is a lot easier than messing around for
hours like I did wondering what was going wrong. It would of course be
much better if Microsoft were to change their programme to accomodate
printing cell borders with finer lines and to gray scale but I cannot
see this happening.
If you know of a way of doing all this in a much easier way I would be
extremely pleased to hear about it.


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DavieM
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