Print Gridlines in Excel

- Written by Puneet

Each cell in an Excel worksheet has a light grey border called gridlines. But when you print data, Excel won’t print it on the paper.

You can activate an option to print the gridlines while printing the data from a worksheet. So, let’s get started.

Activate the Print Gridlines Option in Excel

  1. First, go to the “Page Layout” tab.
  2. Then, go to the “Sheets Options” group of options.
  3. From there, under the Gridlines option, there are two checkmarks.
  4. Now, tick mark the “Print” check box.
page-layout-tab

When you checkmark the print checkbox, it tells Excel to print gridlines and the print. But you need to take care of one thing: it will only print gridlines with the cells for the used range.

print-gridlines

In the above example, you can see that it shows gridlines up to the last cell with the value.

Another Way to Activate the Print Gridlines Option

You can also activate the option from the page setup dialog box. Go to the Page Layout Tab and click the tiny downward arrow to open the page layout.

page-setup-dialog-box

In the page layout, go to the Sheet tab and tick mark the “Gridlines” checkbox under the print. In the end, click OK to save the setting.

tickmark-gridlines-checkbox-image

Note – When you use any of the above ways to activate the print gridlines option, it only applies to the current workbook, not all the workbooks.

Changing the Color of the Gridlines

If you want to take a color printout instead of black and white, you can also change the color of the gridlines. Go to the File Tab and open the Excel Options.

change-color-of-gridlines

From there, go to Advanced and under the ““”Display options for this worksheet”””, click on the gridline color drop-down and select the color you want to apply.

Using Borders Instead of Gridlines

If you want to print gridlines for the entire page instead of the used range, you can apply a border to the data and then print the data.

Select the data you want to print with the gridlines and then apply borders with the keyboard shortcut Alt > H > B > A.