by Ekaterina Bespalaya, updated on
One of the most common complaints about gridlines is that they are not printed by default. In this article you'll learn how to print gridlines in Excel and get these faint lines brighter on a hard copy by changing the default gridline color.
It's a good idea to preview your worksheet before getting it on paper to make sure that it looks the way you want. Luckily, Excel 2010 and 2013 allow you to preview and print your files in one location -- on the Print tab in the Backstage view. When you go there, you may find that Excel won't print gridlines in your sheet. As the result, you will get a stack of papers with the data that can be difficult to separate visually.
To cope with this problem, you can use the Borders option or just make Excel print gridlines. The first way will take you a good deal of time. So if you, as many other users, want to do it faster, read this article and find out how to print lines in Excel without drawing cell borders.
It really takes you a few seconds to instruct Excel to print gridlines. Just go to the Sheets Options group on the PAGE LAYOUT tab and check the Print box under Gridlines.
It's that simple! Now you can leisurely keep working on your worksheet.
If you want to make sure that the document will be printed with gridlines, just navigate to FILE -> Print or press the Ctrl + P keyboard shortcut. In the Print Preview pane you will see how your worksheet will look like on the printouts.
If you forget to enable the Print Gridlines option in the Ribbon, you can do it just before getting a paper copy of your spreadsheet. Here are easy-to-follow steps to print gridlines in Excel keeping the Print Preview pane open.
Note: If you've already got out of the Backstage view, you can either go to FILE -> Print or press Ctrl + P to come back.
You will immediately see your spreadsheet with lines in the Print Preview pane.
Note: Excel does not print gridlines around empty cells in a worksheet. If you want to include blank rows and columns into printing as well, just use the Print Area icon to set the range.
By default, gridlines in Excel spreadsheets are light gray. If you're printing your sheet with grid on a color printer, you can change the lines color for something more attention-getting.
You will see that the cell boundaries are accurately outlined by colored lines. They will help you read information on the paper copy of your spreadsheet, keeping rows and columns with data visually organized.
Alongside with grid lines, you can also improve readability of your Excel document by printing row and column headers on every page.
Now you know how to print gridlines in Excel 2016-2010 and change the default gridline color. I hope you'll find these simple tricks helpful, and your colleagues will appreciate your friendly way of printing out data.
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