Posted this to the formatting group, but it's not getting through. Also
tried to post it here, same problem. Am trying again without the attachment.
Please email me if you can help, I can send you the files described.

<snipped>Attached is zip file containing all files mentioned here.>

Basically I have a word document set up to mail merge with an excel file to
produce cards for a tabletop sports game.

I have two problems

i) if you look on the word file (the excel file is included so that the word
document doesnt complain!), the card for Bernard Berrian for example, the
shading works fine in WORD - no overlap, but if you look at the PDF version,
the rows "overlap" a bit, the grey shading covers up bits of the rows above
and below.

To get to PDF all I'm doing is changing my printer from Lexmark to the
"Adobe Acrobat PDF Writer" option, and yes, I've checked the paper and
margin settings so it's not that.

Does anyone know why the output in PDF is not the same as in WORD? why is
word keeping the rows separate, and PDF isnt?

this leads to my 2nd (and main) problem

ii) where is the setting for those rows that are shaded? I'm buggered if I
can remember how I did it. I've tried "format, borders and shading" and
clearing shading from cell, table, paragraph, text - to no avail. I cannot
work out where to turn this shading option off now, which I need to do to
see if the PDF output is better. It's not good to have rows obscured!

please, help if you can, I am "power user" of the PC, experienced programmer
etc, but sometimes it seems all too easy to be reduced to a head scratching
idiot when trying to do something you intuitively feel should be very
obvious.