Text does not appear in a text box after you paste an Excel chart into Word in Office 2003

When you paste an Excel 2003 chart that contains a text box into Word 2003, text does not appear in the text box.

This problem occurs if you paste the whole Excel 2003 worksheet that contains the chart into Word 2003.

This problem occurs because the automatic font that is applied to text in the text box does not appear when you paste the worksheet that contains the chart into Word. The text is still in the text box, but you must apply a different font color to make it appear. In this case, the import code incorrectly interprets the background color of the text box as a very dark color. As a result, the auto white feature for text boxes that is included in Word 2003 changes the font color for text in that text box to a white color. The text font color is now the same as the background color of the text box. This problem only occurs when you use the default pasting format (HTML) from Excel 2003 to Word 2003.

To work around this problem, use one of the following methods:

Method 1

Change the font color of the text in the text box to make it appear.

Method 2

Paste the Excel 2003 worksheet that contains the chart as an image file. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Copy the worksheet from Excel 2003.
2. In Word 2003, click Paste Special on the Edit menu.
3. In the Paste Special dialog box, click an image format (for example, click Picture (Windows Metafile)), and then click OK.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Office Word 2003.