Gridline behavior for Excel tables embedded in Word docs - What changed?

[u/amreagan]

As we have moved from Windows 11 v23H2 to Windows 11 v25H2 in our environment, it appears that the behavior of gridlines in embedded Word documents has changed. It has proven to be a pretty frustrating experience for our firm. I know this isn't that big of an issue for everyday users. However, if you're trying to prepare financial statements with embedded tables and don't want gridlines, now there are some pretty undesirable steps to make it happen.

In the past, we've been able to make changes to these tables without having to remove them and re-import them to hide the gridlines. I'm also getting reports that re-opening the document after everything is fixed and saved can still result in the formatting appearing differently than when the document was closed.

I suspect it is somehow tied to the OS because we have seen it in the current versions of the workstation OS and server OS when the Office version numbers are the same in older versions of Windows. The older versions of Windows don't have the issue. Has anyone found any registry entries or config settings that force Office to revert to the previous behavior of hiding the gridlines in Word when the gridlines are set to visible in the Excel doc before inserting the table?

* Microsoft has said for over a decade that preventing this problem requires disabling viewing and printing of gridlines in Excel before pasting the table into Word, but this problem did not appear in our environment until sometime this year. People are upset that they are now seeing the expected behavior and want it to work like it used to. However, we can't even find that the desired behavior ever existed in documentation, although we have hundreds of employees who know otherwise.