Any Excel gurus in the house?

I'm in the middle of creating a spreadsheet for work, and am frustrated by my inability to get font colors to print in their formatted shade. I'm trying to get a group of cells to have 25% gray background and text color (the point being for the text to be invisible), and on the working spreadsheet it looks perfect. But in both print preview and the actual hard copy all the text in these cells comes up the standard black while the background color prints correctly.

Any ideas?

I've tried this using both regular and conditional formatting, and the "Black and White" box in the various page setup/print setup locations is not checked.

Thanks...

this doesn't really answer your question, but why don't you just make the box gray or blank so it prints that way? why are you trying to hide the text when you print it?

i'm just curious, not criticizing you

Well, I've got a big range of cells with formulas feeding all of them, but not all of them will be used at once which leaves a large portion of them returning a #N/A error, which looks ugly in large quantities. So I want to be able to completely gray out everything in the cell when it returns that error. I have the formatting working, but just couldn't get it to print right.

But I actually just found the answer to my problem, apparently my black and white printer wouldn't recognize anything but black and white text, its color-capable counterpart does exactly what it should.

So never mind I guess...

Are you manually graying out the cells you don't want to show?

How about using a formual that returns empty text ("") instead. Then it will automatically show blank cells.

ie: =IF(A3="","",SUM(A2+A3))