Excel 2007 + SP2 + PDF = Distorted Charts
July 9th, 2009 by 
Jared Bothwell
Microsoft released Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) on the 24th of April 2009. I quickly installed this and was pretty impressed with some of the new features and fixes.
What I wasn’t aware of was a bug that SP2 brings with it. The issues arises if you try to save a excel sheet or workbook as a pdf and if your workbook features any charts. The result is that any charts featured in your workbook will be severely distorted. To date there is no known fix for this issue and you have two choices to resolve the issue.
They are:
- Uninstall SP2
- Uninstall and reinstall Office 2007
Uninstall SP2
Apparently Sp2 is the first service pack which Microsoft has enabled you to actually uninstall. The download required is here Following this process is easier said than done though and while their a number of blogs that provide some detailed instructions on how to accomplish the removal of SP2, it was beyond me and I gave up (after four hours or trying).
Uninstall and reinstall Office 2007
I recommend not wasting too much time trying to uninstall sp2 and just do a complete reinstall of 2007. A repair will not work because as far as office 2007 is concerned there is nothing to repair. I admit that doing a reinstall is not ideal but it does work.
I do wonder two things through, why did Microsoft release SP2 with such serious error and secondly why haven’t they come up with a fix yet. Quite disappointing and quite frustrating.
Beware of SP2
Posted in Online Market Research Tools | 7 Comments »
July 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Does anyone knwo if there is a temp fix or patch for this as i cannot roll back sp2 due to policys. thanks for any advise as we are using the save as pdf as part of a vba script.
July 30th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
As far as I am aware no fix has been released, likewise I was using the save as pdf function. I had no success with the roll back so had to do a complete reinstall.
Works fine now, I won’t upgrade to SP2 until the fix is found. Please let me know if you do find a fix though.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
i dloaded the following program and it works fine …
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
September 8th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Looks like SP1 causes the same issue as well, just installed as I thought it may fix another issue I was having (it didn’t) just caused charts mess up when they are saved as PDF. If you require this function do not upgrade Office at all as the only way to fix is to do a re-install.
September 8th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
well good timing i have bneen wrestling with this issue for weeks but resolved this morning. try
uninstall Security Update KB 969682
Works fine now, but still remove office and only install to SP1.
Mike
September 8th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Also
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=34753293&threadid=34423775 & http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941506
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969682
September 8th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Thanks Mike, I have just done the re-install so might leave it for now, but next time I update will make sure to give it a go.