Remove Gridlines in Excel and Show Them Again

To remove gridlines in Excel, go to the View tab and untick Gridlines. The faint grey lines between cells disappear, and your sheet looks like a clean page, which is ideal for reports, dashboards and screenshots. Tick the box again to bring them back. This guide covers the keyboard shortcut, changing several sheets at once, printing, and what to do when gridlines vanish by themselves.

What are gridlines in Excel?#

Gridlines are the light grey lines that mark the edges of every cell. They help you see where you are while you work, but they are not part of your data or your formatting. They don't appear in printouts by default, and they disappear when you turn them off.

Borders are different: they are formatting you add to chosen cells, and they always show and always print. Mixing up the two is the most common reason a printout looks different from the screen. The Excel terms glossary defines both in one line each.

How to remove gridlines in Excel#

Hide gridlines from the View tab. The steps are the same in Excel for Windows and for Mac:

1. Click the sheet you want to change.
2. Go to the View tab.
3. In the Show group, untick Gridlines.

On Windows you can do it without the mouse: press and release Alt, then W, V, G, one after another. This presses the View tab, then the Gridlines box. Run the same keys again to switch them back on.

There is also a second Gridlines box on the Page Layout tab, under Sheet Options. Its View tick does the same thing as the View tab box. Its Print tick is covered below.

The setting is saved with the workbook, so the sheet stays clean when someone else opens it.

How to hide headings and the formula bar too#

For a dashboard or a screenshot, gridlines are often only the start. The same Show group on the View tab has two more boxes:

• Headings hides the row numbers and column letters.
• Formula Bar hides the bar above the grid where formulas appear.

Untick all three for the cleanest look, then tick them again before you go back to editing. Like gridlines, Headings is saved with each sheet. The formula bar setting applies to Excel itself, so it stays hidden in your other workbooks until you turn it back on.

How to remove gridlines from several sheets at once#

The Gridlines setting belongs to each sheet, not the whole workbook. To change many sheets at once, group them first:

1. Click the first sheet tab.
2. Hold Ctrl (Mac: ⌘) and click each other tab you want. To pick every sheet, right-click a tab and choose Select All Sheets.
3. Untick Gridlines on the View tab.
4. Right-click any selected tab and choose Ungroup Sheets.

Don't skip step 4. While sheets are grouped, anything you type or format goes into every sheet in the group, which can quietly overwrite data.

How to show gridlines again#

Go to View and tick Gridlines, or press Alt, W, V, G again on Windows. If the box is already ticked and you still can't see any lines, something else is hiding them. See the troubleshooting section below.

Do gridlines print in Excel?#

No, not unless you ask for them. Screen gridlines and printed gridlines are separate settings:

• To print gridlines, go to Page Layout > Sheet Options, and under Gridlines tick Print.
• Check the result in File > Print (Windows: Ctrl+P; Mac: ⌘P) before you send it.

Printed gridlines cover the whole printed area, so every empty cell inside it gets lines too. For a neater result, add borders only around your table. The guide to adding borders shows the quickest ways, and the guide to Excel print setup covers fitting a sheet onto one page and repeating the header row.

Why can't I see gridlines?#

If gridlines have disappeared and you didn't turn them off, one of these is usually the cause:

The white-fill cause catches many people out. A cell filled with white looks blank but hides the grid. "No Fill" is not the same as white.

How to make a clean report without gridlines#

Turning gridlines off works best when the rest of the sheet is formatted to stand on its own. A few quick steps go a long way:

1. Bold the headers with Ctrl+B (Mac: ⌘B).
2. Format the numbers with a thousands separator or currency style. The guide to formatting numbers as currency and percent lists the shortcuts.
3. Add a bottom border under the header row and a top border above the total row.
4. Freeze the header row if the list is long, so column names stay visible as you scroll. See how to freeze panes.
5. Add a summary line, such as ="Total sales: "&TEXT(SUM(B2:B5),"$#,##0"), which shows Total sales: $41,950 for the four regions in the exercise.

The TEXT function in step 5 gives the label the same currency look as the formatted cells. Keep the real numbers in their own cells, though: TEXT returns text, so other formulas can't add it up.

Practise it#

A report without gridlines only looks good when the formatting underneath is clean. Practise the formatting shortcuts in a live spreadsheet: you bold headers and apply currency and percent from the keyboard, and each step is checked instantly. Then practise more formatting, including comma style, date formats and resetting a cell to General. Or try the summary-line exercise on this page first.