Has anyone else had a swatch not show up when a picture box is selected

Question

I am having an issue with swatches in inDesign CS3, we have a background with a feather so the box fades from grey to white, the grey needs to be a specific CMYK breakdown which we have created in the swatch palette. However when we come to check the image is the correct colour (we have had occurences where documents have gone to print with the incorrect colour) sometimes when you select the box it shows up as the colour in the swatch pallette but sometimes it doesn't and no colour is selected, you then have to go to the tool box and double click the fill colour to check the breakdown which can still be correct but why does it not show up in the swatch pallette sometimes but not others? This is becoming a real issue as we have a lot of previous documents that need to be checked and it is not easy to do and not always that accurate.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

Hello John, thanks for your reply, sorry if my post is unclear, I will try to explain it a bit more precisely.
Regarding your reply, I wonder if that may be the problem that a colour has been previously been created by clicking on the colour in the tool box rather than creating a swatch. I have only recently started at the company so was not involved in the creation of the original documents so that could be the case.
Basically several documents have been created for a client by different employees, these have then been repeated over many different pieces of artwork. It was recently discovered that some printed copies had come out a different shade of grey to the others.
So every time we use a previous piece of artwork or create something new we need to ensure the grey is the correct CMYK breakdown to match their corporate standards.
The issue is with the background colour which is created using the rectangle frame tool, filled with a solid grey and then using a gradiant feather to make it fade to white. Why this wasn't done using the gradiant tool I dont know and perhaps this is the problem?
So when opening old documents to check the colour this is when the problem occurs as we click on the box and no colour shows up in the swatch pallette, I have created a colour swatch, closed the document and on re-opening the document the same thing occurs.
We have a large quantity of documents that need to be checked and we need a precise and accurate way of ensuring the gradiant colour is correct for future use.
Is there any preference to using a solid colour and feather or the gradiant tool?
And any advice as to why the issue with the swatch pallette would happen would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time, Jackie