The image is right there on the screen. It is in the right cell, the right size, perfectly visible while you work. Then you hit print — or open Print Preview — and it is gone. The data prints. The borders print. The logo, the chart snapshot, the inserted photo: nothing.
This is one of those Excel problems where the instinct is to blame the printer. Resist that instinct. The printer is almost never the cause. In nearly every case the image isn’t printing because Excel has been told not to print it, and the setting that does the telling is buried two dialog boxes deep where no reasonable person would think to look. Once you know where it lives, the fix takes about ten seconds.
Here is the order to work through, ranked by how often each cause is actually the culprit. Do them in sequence and stop at the one that fixes it.
Cause 1: The “Print object” property is unchecked
This is the offender about three-quarters of the time, and it is the first thing to check before you touch anything else.
Every floating object in Excel — pictures, shapes, text boxes, charts, embedded snapshots — carries an individual property that decides whether it appears on paper. It is called Print object, and it can be switched off without you ever knowing you did it. Pasting an image from certain sources, copying objects between workbooks, or opening a file created in an older Excel version can all leave this box unchecked.
To find it:
- Right-click the image that won’t print.
- Choose Size and Properties (in some versions this reads Format Picture or Format Object).
- In the Format pane that opens on the right, click the Size & Properties icon (the square with arrows).
- Expand the Properties section.
- Make sure Print object has a tick in it.
If it was unchecked, that was your problem. Tick it, check Print Preview, and you are done.
The catch worth knowing: this property is per-object, not per-sheet. If you have five logos on a sheet and only some are printing, each missing one needs checking individually. There is no global “print all objects” switch — Microsoft has never added one, which is exactly the kind of small omission that turns a non-problem into a forty-minute hunt.
Cause 2: Draft quality printing is switched on
If Print object is ticked and the image still won’t appear, the next suspect is Draft quality. This is a page-level setting designed to print faster and use less ink by skipping anything Excel considers non-essential — gridlines, some borders, and graphics objects, images included.
The problem is that people enable it once for a quick test print, forget about it, and then spend an afternoon wondering why their images vanished. Worse, it is a per-worksheet setting that travels with the file, so a draft-quality workbook someone emailed you will silently strip your images too.
To check it:
- Go to the Page Layout tab.
- Click the small arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Page Setup group to open the full dialog.
- Go to the Sheet tab.
- Under Print, make sure Draft quality is unticked.
Click OK and re-check the preview. Draft quality is a far more common cause than its obscurity suggests, precisely because nobody remembers turning it on.
Cause 3: Images render on screen but fail in Print Preview only
This is the more interesting case: the image is fine in normal view, Print object is ticked, draft quality is off — but Print Preview shows nothing. When the failure is specifically between the screen and the preview, you are usually looking at a graphics-rendering problem rather than a print-settings problem.
The fix is to disable hardware graphics acceleration. Excel offloads some rendering to your graphics card, and on machines with older or mismatched display drivers that offloading can corrupt how objects are passed to the print engine — they draw fine on the live screen but never make it into the printed output.
Go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to the Display section, and tick Disable hardware graphics acceleration. Restart Excel and test.
One honest caveat: Microsoft has removed this checkbox from several recent Microsoft 365 builds, where acceleration is now managed automatically or only via the registry and Group Policy. If the option simply isn’t there, that is not you missing it — it has genuinely gone. In that situation, updating your graphics driver is the more productive move, and it is the one Microsoft would rather you made anyway.
Cause 4: A linked image instead of an embedded one
If, instead of a blank space, your printout shows a box reading “The linked image cannot be displayed,” you have a different problem entirely. The image was inserted as a link to an external file rather than embedded into the workbook, and Excel can no longer reach that file — it has been moved, renamed, deleted, or the workbook has travelled to a machine that never had access to it.
The clean fix is to delete the broken object and re-insert the picture using Insert > Pictures > This Device, then make sure you click the Insert button itself rather than the small Insert and Link option beside it. That second option is responsible for a surprising amount of “my image disappeared” misery, and for most people the linking behaviour is something they never wanted and never knowingly chose. Embed by default. Link only when you have a deliberate reason to.
Cause 5: The image sits outside the print area
The least glamorous cause, but worth a glance if everything above checks out. If the image is positioned past the edge of your defined print area or beyond a manual page break, it lives on the sheet but never enters the printed region.
Check Page Layout > Print Area — if a print area is set, confirm the image falls inside it, or clear the print area entirely and reprint. Switching to View > Page Break Preview makes the printable boundary obvious and shows instantly whether your image is inside the lines or stranded outside them.
Cause 6: Objects are hidden workbook-wide
This one explains the alarming version of the problem — where every image and shape has vanished at once, not just one. Excel has a workbook-level setting that hides all floating objects in a single stroke, and it has a keyboard shortcut sitting right next to keys people press constantly.
The shortcut is Ctrl+6, which toggles between showing all objects and hiding them all. It is genuinely easy to hit by accident, and once triggered, every picture, chart and shape disappears from both the screen and the printout simultaneously. The same setting lives at File > Options > Advanced, under Display options for this workbook, where For objects, show: can be set to All or Nothing (hide objects).
If all your objects are gone together, press Ctrl+6 once and watch them reappear. If they do, that was it. This sits at Cause 6 rather than higher up only because it produces such an obvious all-or-nothing symptom that most people notice it differently from a single stubborn image — but it catches a surprising number of people who think they have corrupted their file.
A note on printing to PDF
A growing share of “printing” today is really exporting to PDF, and the cause matters here. If your images appear when you print to paper but vanish in the PDF, the culprit is usually the export path rather than any object setting. The Save As > PDF route and the Microsoft Print to PDF virtual printer handle objects differently, and on some configurations the latter drops graphics that the former keeps. If a PDF is losing your images, switch methods: use File > Export > Create PDF/XPS instead of printing to the PDF driver, and check whether the result improves before chasing object properties.
The thirty-second diagnostic
When this lands on your desk and you have no patience for theory, run this:
- Image missing entirely, on screen and preview both fine in normal view → check Print object on that image (Cause 1), then Draft quality (Cause 2).
- Image fine in normal view, gone only in Print Preview → disable hardware graphics acceleration or update your display driver (Cause 3).
- A “linked image cannot be displayed” box appears → re-insert the picture as embedded, not linked (Cause 4).
- Image present but never reaches the page → check the print area and page breaks (Cause 5).
- Every image and shape gone at once → press Ctrl+6 to unhide objects (Cause 6).
Ninety percent of the time you will stop at Cause 1.
What not to waste time on
A few “fixes” circulate on forums that mostly waste your afternoon. Reinstalling Office will not fix an unchecked Print object property — the property travels with the file, not the installation. Switching printers does nothing, because the image was filtered out before the print job ever reached the driver. And re-saving in a different format only helps in the narrow linked-image case, not the far more common settings cases.
If your images print but jump around or detach from their cells when you sort or filter, that is a separate anchoring issue worth reading up on in Excel images not moving with cells. And if you are working with the newer in-cell images rather than floating objects, the print behaviour differs again — see Excel: Insert Picture in Cell troubleshooting for how those handle output.