In this post, we will see how to hide the Gridlines in Microsoft Excel. The horizontal and vertical faint lines that represent the boundaries and are used to distinguish cells on the worksheet are called ‘Gridlines’. By default, gridlines are displayed in worksheets using a color that is assigned by Excel.
How to hide Gridlines in Excel
If you do not like the default color, you can change it to a color of your choice or even remove them. What are the benefits that Gridlines offer in a worksheet?
Firstly, they make your data tables readable when they are without a border and second, gridlines make it easier for you to align text or objects. That said, removing gridlines makes your worksheet look a lot more presentable. Should you wish to remove the gridlines, here are the steps you can follow.
We cover here 3 methods to hide gridlines in Excel Worksheet.
1] Hide Gridlines in Excel using Traditional Method
- Open Excel sheet
- Navigate to the “View” tab on the Excel ribbon
- Under it, search for the Gridlines option in ‘Show’ section.
- When found, uncheck the “Gridlines” option and the gridlines will be hidden, instantly.
- Alternatively, you can choose to hide the grid lines from “Page layout” and uncheck the Gridlines “View” option.
2] Remove Excel gridlines by using the shortcut key
If you use Windows shortcuts frequently to perform various tasks, here’s another for you. To hide gridlines in Excel worksheet using a Windows shortcut key. Press “Alt + W+V+G” key in combination and see the magic work.
3] Hide Gridlines in Excel by changing background color:
A very simple way of hiding the gridlines in Excel is by changing their background color so that it matches the worksheet background.
To begin, press Ctrl key + A in combination to select all the rows and columns of the spreadsheet. Then, click the “Fill Color” option and select the white color.
If your find for some reason your Excel Worksheet grid lines are invisible and do not appear by default. You can show them by pressing keys “Alt + WVG” or checking the ‘Gridlines’ option again (highlighted in the first method to make the gridlines clearly visible.
Enjoy a gridless Excel worksheet!
Read next: How to make Excel cells expand to fit Text automatically.
Why Billy the goat has to complicate everything? Earlier Excel/ Word versions you could change the default setting and every notebook/ sheet would behave the way you wanted. Now this seems to have been removed for reasons best known to Billy the goat and fellow (mental) dwarves!
The thousands employed in MS must be striving hard to please Billy by making life as miserable as possible for users of MS. (And like Indian auto drivers, their daily lives have no meaning if they dont get thousands of swear words thrown at them)