How to Remove Gridlines from Excel

What this does

Gridlines are the faint guides Excel draws between cells. They are not borders: they never print unless you ask, they cannot be recoloured per cell, and hiding them changes nothing about the data. Three separate controls exist. View ▸ Gridlines toggles them on screen for the active sheet. Page Layout ▸ Gridlines ▸ Print toggles them on paper. And filling cells with white under Home ▸ Fill Color hides them behind the fill, which is what makes a dashboard look like a designed page rather than a spreadsheet. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. For “remove gridlines from excel”, the reliable version is a short checking loop, not just the first command that appears to work. Run it on a deliberately small range first, watch how the affected gridlines change, and only then apply the same setup to the full sheet. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. That is what makes a workspace setting that makes a big sheet comfortable to navigate useful in real work: repeatable, auditable, and not dependent on memory or luck.

A worked example

To turn a summary sheet into a clean report: untick View ▸ Show ▸ Gridlines, then select the header block and apply a white fill so it stays clean even if someone re-enables gridlines. To get the lines back for editing, tick View ▸ Show ▸ Gridlines again. To print visible lines around a data table, do not rely on gridlines at all — select the range and apply Home ▸ Borders ▸ All Borders. Hiding gridlines is the single change that most makes a sheet read as a finished report rather than a working file, and knowing the print toggle is separate saves the "why is my table invisible on paper" round trip. A practical tip: try it on a copy of the sheet or a handful of sample rows first and check the result before you apply it to the real data. That one habit catches almost every surprise while it is still cheap to reverse.

In Google Sheets

This is a command rather than a formula, so there is no syntax to carry over. Google Sheets arranges its commands in menus across the top instead of a ribbon, names some of them differently and does not have every Excel command — look for the equivalent in the Sheets menus or its help before assuming the steps match. The aim was to get you unstuck fast and leave you a little more capable than a copy-paste would. The answer is at the top and the detail above shows why it holds — so the next time a colleague asks, you can answer without reaching for search. If you take one thing from this page on “remove gridlines from excel”, make it the order of checks rather than the individual clicks: confirm what is selected, apply the step, and look at the result before moving on. That small routine is what keeps Excel work predictable when the same task comes back in a slightly different workbook.

Common mistakes

• Confusing gridlines with borders — hiding gridlines removes nothing you applied with the Borders button.
• Expecting the View toggle to change the printout; printing has its own checkbox on the Page Layout tab.
• Hiding gridlines on one sheet and assuming the workbook followed; the setting is per worksheet.
• Using a white fill to fake hidden gridlines and then wondering why an empty-looking area is not really empty.

Frequently asked questions