Excel texbox madness.

January 19, 2008 8:23 PM

I'm an Excel idiot! Why won't my text boxes show that they have a solid fill?

So I'm basically just making a pretty chart with no serious Excel features. Every time I add a textbox over a picture I've inserted, it won't show the fill behind it. If I add a border in the textbox formatting window, the border shows up, so I'm at a loss as to why the fill wouldn't. When I click in the texbox to edit the text it shows the proper fill... then doesn't show up in print preview. Sorry in advance for what must be an obvious answer, but I really can't seem to figure this one out.

posted by Thin Lizzy to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Not quite clear about what you want. If you insert a picture, then put a text box over the top of that, do you want to still see the picture showing through the text box? If you do, you need to set the background on the text box to None.
posted by flabdablet at 10:25 PM on January 19, 2008

Best answer: If you want the text box's own background to show instead of the picture behind it, make sure transparency is set to 0%.
posted by flabdablet at 11:53 PM on January 19, 2008

Response by poster: Yep... opacity and transparency are not the same things. In fact, they're opposite things and one should set them as such for best results.

Thanks!
posted by Thin Lizzy at 7:46 AM on January 20, 2008