A co-worker is experiencing a problem I have not seen before. He designed a template spreadsheet with many tabs (40 or so is my guess). He has used this document for about 3 or 4 months, just refreshing the data in the linked spreadsheet and saving off the template to reflect the new data. This time, however, he is getting the "margins do not fit page size" error when he does a print preview on a few of the tabs. When he clicks OK, the preview comes up and says that it is displaying 1 of 252 pages or so and the page is no bigger than a postage stamp when displayed. When he exits the preview and goes into page setup, it opens to the "margins" tab and will not let him view any other tabs. Margins are set at .25" all around, except 1" at bottom. When we use page break preview, it shows a page break after each row and each column of data.

Anyone have a clue as to what is going on here? How do I correct it?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Scott

Edited by: sdosborne on Tue Aug 15 13:48:19 EDT 2006.

Hi Scott,

Does it help if you go into Page Break Preview, Right Click and select "Reset All Page Breaks"?

Not immediately. If we do that, save it, exit, then open the document again, all is fine. But, why did this happen in the first palce?

It could be a printer issue. If he previewed the file while the active printer was set to a printer with odd print margins (i.e., receipt printer), it might have caused a problem.

Otherwise, not a clue.

Thanks for the help, Eric. We only have standard printers here, so your guess is as good as mine. It is just frustrating for him because this is the 4th time it has happened and not just with this document. However, it is the first time he mentioned it to me.

This has happened to another person a few weeks ago and I chalked it up to pebkac (problem exists between problem and chair), but now that it is repeating, I will need to find out what is causing it and correct it. Thanks again.

Hello all,

This problem has resurfaced in a different user, who is using completely unrelated documents. Now, we have three users who experienced this issue in a fairly short amount of time (about 2 weeks). Does anyone know of settings that may cause this to happen? Any ideas other than the printer issue brought up by Eric? We all use the same printers (standard, networked IBM Infoprint 17s and 21s) so if it happens because of the printer, I would expect everyone to have the problem at the same time. Could it be a new virus that hasn't been detected so far (McAfee Enterprise 8.0i is used with virus definitions updated as of today)? Any other ideas?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Scott

Through some research, I have found the issue - a known MS bug. See the details:
MS Knowledgebase article

Although we don't have to take the steps outlined in the article to experience the issue, at least is confirms for me that it is a known bug. The problem is in the way settings are saved within a document when you change from a PCL printer to a PS printer. Evidently there are settings that are incompatible between the two.

To solve the problem all you need to do is (assumes you are trying to print to printer A):
File > print
Change the printer from A to B, given that A and B have the same printer driver.
- All of our printers use the same driver, so that is not a problem. If all your printers do not have the same driver, then you will need to install printer A a second time (before starting this process), but give it a different name, B, for example.
Click on the close button.
You should see all of your page breaks disappear.
File > print
Change the printer back to A.
Click on the close button.
Print preview the document.
If is still isn't quite right, the scaling is probably set to 10%. Change it back to your desired settings.
All should be fine.

Something else I discovered while on this journey - if you set scaling to 1 by 1 page and have columns and rows set to repeat on each page, it really messes with the scaling. Once we took out the repeating elements, it was fine.

Here is why we are experiencing the issue:
For reasons I am sure I don't need to go into, we publish our data in PDFs using PDF995.
Because it uses PostScript and our IT dept forces the use of PCL drivers for our printers, we end up with the problem. What I don't understand is why we are just now experiencing the issue. We have been using PDF995 for about 2 years with no upgrades since first install. Probably related to a print server upgrade of some sort.

As usual, Eric was pointing me in the right direction. I just didn't make the connection with PDF995 because we have used it successfully for so long and I didn't see it as an "unusual" printer like a label or receipt printer. I'm sorry I doubted your suggestion, Eric. You are THE man.

I hope this post helps others avoid the stress and wasted document recreation efforts our department has experienced because of this bug.

Scott

Interesting information Scott. We also have had issues using PCL print drivers. I switched our office's print drivers from PCL to PS a while back because we were having issues printing Access reports and it cleared up the problem. I guess your issue is that your IT department is a bit more strict than ours.

Glad you got it worked out.