Strikethrough is one of those Excel features people search for the moment they need it — and then promptly forget where it lives. You want a line through old prices, completed tasks, or discontinued SKUs, and Excel hides the option behind a dialog box instead of putting it on the ribbon like Word does. Frustrating? Sure. But once you learn the keyboard shortcut, you'll apply strikethrough in Excel faster than anyone on your team.

Here's the short version: press Ctrl+5 on Windows or Cmd+Shift+X on a modern Mac. That's it. Select a cell, a range, or even just a few characters inside a cell, hit the shortcut, and the text gets crossed out. Hit it again to toggle off. The whole operation takes under a second once the keystroke is muscle memory.

But shortcuts are only half the story. Excel actually exposes strikethrough through four different paths, and each one suits a different situation. The keyboard shortcut wins for one-off edits. The Format Cells dialog is the discovery method most beginners stumble into. The Quick Access Toolbar lets you add a one-click button for users who hate keystrokes. And conditional formatting — by far the most powerful option — automatically strikes through cells the moment a value changes, like ticking "Complete" in a status column. Task lists, to-do trackers, and inventory sheets become genuinely interactive once you wire up that last method.

This guide walks through all four approaches, plus the common sticking points: removing strikethrough, applying it to part of a cell, why printing sometimes looks off, and what changes on Excel for the web.

By the time you finish reading, you'll know which method to reach for in every scenario you're likely to hit.

The keyboard shortcut is the fastest way, but it's not always the most discoverable. New Excel users often look for a "Strikethrough" button on the ribbon — and they don't find one, because Microsoft never added it there by default. Instead, the canonical home of strikethrough lives inside the Format Cells dialog, which you can open with Ctrl+1 from any selected cell or range.

Once the dialog opens, click the Font tab. In the bottom-left corner of that tab, under the "Effects" section, you'll see three checkboxes: Strikethrough, Superscript, and Subscript. Tick the Strikethrough box, watch the preview pane update on the right, and click OK. Every cell in your current selection now has a horizontal line drawn through its text. The font color, weight, and size stay exactly as they were — Excel only adds the line.

This method is slower than Ctrl+5, but it has two real advantages. First, it shows you the preview, which matters if you're working with merged cells, complex fonts, or want to combine strikethrough with other effects like superscript at the same time. Second, it works identically on every version of Excel ever shipped, including Excel 2003, Excel for Mac, Excel for the web, and Excel Mobile. The keyboard shortcut isn't always reliable across every platform, but the dialog box always is.

Power users prefer the dialog when applying multiple changes at once. Maybe you want strikethrough, plus a red font color, plus italic — all on the same selection. Three shortcuts means three round-trips to the keyboard. Format Cells handles all three in one dialog, with one OK button.

It's faster for batch styling, slower for single toggles. Pick your method based on what else needs to change.

If you apply strikethrough often enough that even Ctrl+5 feels like work, add a dedicated button to your Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). The QAT is that small strip of icons above or below the ribbon — usually showing Save, Undo, and Redo by default — and you can pin any Excel command to it for one-click access from anywhere in the application.

To add the Strikethrough button: go to File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar. In the dropdown labeled "Choose commands from," select "All Commands." Scroll down the alphabetical list until you find "Strikethrough." Click it, then click the Add button in the middle of the dialog. Move it up or down with the arrows on the right if you want it in a specific position. Click OK, and the icon appears on your QAT instantly.

From now on, selecting any cell and clicking that button applies or removes strikethrough — no keyboard, no dialog, no menu hunting. The button also picks up a number shortcut automatically: if it's the fourth icon on your QAT, you can press Alt+4 to trigger it. That gives you a second keyboard shortcut path, which is handy if Ctrl+5 conflicts with something else on your system or you've remapped keys for accessibility reasons.

Some people prefer to add Strikethrough directly to the ribbon instead. You can do that too, through File > Options > Customize Ribbon. Create a new group within an existing tab (Home is the natural choice), then add Strikethrough to that group. The downside is that ribbon customizations are slightly more fragile than QAT customizations — they sometimes reset after major Office updates. The QAT approach has been the most reliable across years of Excel versions.

The fourth method is the one that turns Excel into something more interactive: conditional formatting that applies strikethrough automatically based on a rule. This is how you build task lists where checking off "Complete" instantly draws a line through the task description, or inventory sheets where "Discontinued" SKUs visually fade out without manual reformatting.

Here's the setup. Suppose column A contains task descriptions and column B holds status values like "In Progress" or "Complete." Select the cells in column A that should auto-strike when their column B neighbor turns to "Complete." Then go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule. Choose "Use a formula to determine which cells to format." In the formula box, type =$B2="Complete" — note the dollar sign locking column B, but not the row. Click Format, switch to the Font tab, tick Strikethrough, and click OK twice to close both dialogs.

From that moment forward, any cell in column A automatically gets struck through whenever its neighbor in column B reads "Complete." Change the value in B back to something else, and the strikethrough disappears. This is genuinely dynamic formatting — no manual intervention needed once the rule is in place, and it scales to thousands of rows without performance issues.

The setup gets even better when you combine conditional formatting with checkboxes. Newer versions of Excel (Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024) include native checkbox controls directly in cells — no Developer tab gymnastics required.

Insert a checkbox in column B with the Insert menu, then point the same conditional rule at the checkbox state (TRUE or FALSE). You've built an interactive task list in under a minute. Tick the box, the task strikes through. Untick, it comes back. This single technique turns plain spreadsheets into lightweight project trackers anyone on your team can use without training.

Removing strikethrough uses the same tools that applied it. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+5 toggles — meaning the same keystroke that adds the line also removes it. Select the cell or range, press Ctrl+5, and the line vanishes. Same goes for the Format Cells dialog (Ctrl+1, Font tab, untick Strikethrough) and the Quick Access Toolbar button if you set one up. The Quick Access Toolbar icon even highlights when the active cell already has strikethrough applied, giving you visual confirmation before you click.

For conditional formatting strikethrough, removal works differently. Because the line is being drawn by a rule rather than direct formatting, plain Ctrl+5 will not remove it — it'll add a second layer of strikethrough on top of the conditional one, which usually does nothing visible. To remove the conditional version, you have to either delete the rule (Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules, select the rule, click Delete Rule) or change the triggering value so the rule no longer evaluates true. Pick whichever is easier for your situation.

One feature people often miss is the ability to apply strikethrough to part of a cell's text rather than the entire cell. To do this, double-click the cell (or press F2) to enter edit mode. Select just the characters you want to cross out using either the mouse or Shift+Arrow keys. Now press Ctrl+5. Excel applies strikethrough only to those selected characters, leaving the rest of the cell untouched. This is the technique you need for price comparisons where the old price gets crossed out and the new price stays bold and clear in the same cell.

Partial-cell strikethrough is also how editors track text revisions when they want to preserve a record of what was deleted. Insert the old text, strike it through, type the new text afterward — readers can see both versions side by side and understand the change history at a glance. Excel keeps the formatting intact even when the cell is copied, exported, or shared, so the revision history travels with the document automatically.

Strikethrough behavior varies slightly across platforms, and knowing the differences saves frustration when you're working on a phone or in a browser. Excel for the web supports strikethrough through the same Ctrl+5 shortcut as desktop Excel, but the Format Cells dialog is more limited — you might need to right-click a cell, choose "Format" from the context menu, and then Font from the submenu. The Quick Access Toolbar doesn't exist in the web version, so you can't pin a one-click button there.

On Mac Excel, the shortcut differs depending on which version you're running. Older Mac Excel (2016 and earlier) used Cmd+Shift+X. Microsoft 365 versions of Mac Excel now also support Cmd+5, matching the muscle memory of Windows users who switch platforms. The Format Cells dialog opens with Cmd+1 on Mac, identical to Windows in the Font tab layout. Mac users adding a QAT button follow the same path: Excel menu > Preferences > Ribbon & Toolbar > Quick Access Toolbar.

On Excel Mobile (iOS and Android tablets/phones), strikethrough appears under the Home tab once you tap a cell to select it. The exact icon location depends on screen size — on phones, you may need to scroll the formatting panel horizontally to find the Strikethrough button next to Bold, Italic, and Underline. Keyboard shortcuts work if you have a Bluetooth keyboard connected; on-screen typing means you'll be tapping menus instead.

Printing strikethrough works identically across all platforms. The line is part of font rendering, not a separate object, so any printer that prints normal text also prints strikethrough correctly. Color printers preserve the original font color including the strikethrough line. PDF exports include it cleanly too, which matters when sharing reports outside your organization.

One thing to watch for: in mixed cells where some text is struck and other text isn't, older printer drivers occasionally render the line position slightly differently than the screen preview shows. Always check a test print before sending a large batch through the printer.

For repetitive or programmatic tasks, you can apply strikethrough through Excel's VBA macro language. The relevant property is Font.Strikethrough, which accepts True or False on any Range or Cell object. The simplest example: Range("A1").Font.Strikethrough = True applies strikethrough to cell A1. To toggle across an entire selection, write Selection.Font.Strikethrough = Not Selection.Font.Strikethrough — that single line flips the state of every cell in the active selection.

VBA is overkill for one-off formatting, but it shines when you need strikethrough driven by complex logic that conditional formatting can't easily express. For example: "strike through every row where the date in column C is more than 30 days old AND the status in column D is blank." That's two conditions joined with AND — awkward in conditional formatting, trivial in a macro loop.

Combined with a worksheet event handler, you can run the macro automatically whenever the sheet changes, achieving conditional-formatting-like behavior with arbitrary complexity.

Common business use cases for strikethrough span almost every industry. Task lists use it to mark completion without deleting items, preserving the visual history of work done. Inventory management applies it to discontinued or sold-out SKUs while keeping the product information searchable. Price comparison sheets put old prices in struck-through format next to current prices, making sale percentages obvious at a glance. Editorial workflows use partial-cell strikethrough for tracked changes when working in spreadsheets rather than Word documents. HR records mark terminated employees by striking their names while retaining the data for compliance and audit purposes.

The thing all these use cases share is the need to communicate "no longer active" without losing the underlying information. Deleting a row removes both the value and the record. Hiding rows loses visual context. Strikethrough sits in the middle: it signals deactivation while keeping everything searchable, sortable, and auditable.

That's why it's persisted in spreadsheets for over four decades even as newer features come and go — and why every serious Excel user eventually memorizes Ctrl+5 the way they memorized Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

One last thing worth knowing: strikethrough is highly portable. Files saved with strikethrough applied will open and render identically in Google Sheets, LibreOffice Calc, Apple Numbers, and every other spreadsheet application that reads .xlsx files. The formatting attribute lives in the OOXML cell style definitions, which all major editors parse correctly. So sharing a strikethrough-heavy workbook with a Google Workspace colleague or a Linux user running LibreOffice is safe — the formatting travels with the file.

Be careful with a few edge cases though. CSV exports lose all formatting including strikethrough, because CSV stores only raw values without styling. Export to CSV, share, re-import, and the strikethrough is gone — you'd have to reapply it manually or via macro.

Same with text-based copy-paste into emails or Slack: the formatted version is lost the moment text leaves the spreadsheet clipboard. To preserve strikethrough in external destinations, paste as a screenshot, paste as HTML (most modern apps support it), or export to PDF first.

Worth mentioning: don't confuse strikethrough with the border line through the middle of a cell. Borders are drawn at fixed positions relative to the cell rectangle — top, bottom, left, right, and diagonals. A diagonal border can superficially look like strikethrough.

But borders go through the entire cell regardless of text length, while strikethrough only crosses out actual characters. Want a clean line through "Apple" but not the empty space after it? Use strikethrough. Want a line spanning the whole cell as a divider? Use a diagonal border. The two look similar but behave very differently when cells contain mixed-length values.