PC to MAC Printing Compatibility Question

[Guest]

Our office prepares a number of reports on Microsoft Office 2000/3 that get
sent to others who open and print with Microsoft Office Excel 2004 (MAC).

When others go to open the document and print, often times it does not print
correctly; for instance, on Windows we have a 6 column worksheet that goes
from left margin to right margin that will print on one page but when sent,
opened, and printed on MAC will print 5 columns on one page and 1 on another.

Margins, column sizes, or other formatting have been changed. The document
was simply opened and printed. This occurred when both hard page breaks were
inserted and when flowing page breaks were used.

Do you know any way to ensure printing compatibility from PC to MAC and/or
what could be causing this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Guest]

A Correction to my post above...

Margins, column sizes, or other formatting have NOT been changed.

Thanks!

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Do you know any way to ensure printing compatibility from PC to MAC and/or
what could be causing this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

One primary culprit is using fonts that exist only on one platform (so
they're substituted for on the other), or when the different platform
fonts don't have the same metrics.

Another culprit has to do with print drivers more than platform - on
either platform, using different print drivers can produce different
output.

A third issue is the users Standard Font. XL's column widths are set in
number of numeric characters in the Standard Font. If users have
different standard fonts (Preferences/General), the default column
widths may well be different.

XL was never designed as a layout application, and the developers who
ported XL from Mac to Windows apparently didn't worry overmuch about
compatibility in output, and the divergence has been in existence ever
since.

If you need it to look pretty, save as PDF. If you need it to work in
XL, use standard fonts (e.g., TNR, Arial) of standard size, and consider
setting Page Setup/Page/Fit to... to get the right number of pages
(though that can have weird effects, too).