Those faint grey lines covering every worksheet you open in Excel? Those are gridlines. They're handy when you're entering numbers, but the moment you want a clean report, a polished dashboard, or a screenshot for a presentation, they get in the way. The good news: turning them off takes about three seconds once you know where to look. The slightly less good news: there are four different ways to do it, and the right one depends on what you're trying to achieve.

This guide walks through every method for hiding gridlines, from the one-click toggle on the View tab to the trick most people miss when they actually want a borderless print. We'll also cover the common gotchas: gridlines that come back the next time you open the file, gridlines that vanish on one sheet but linger on another, and the difference between hiding gridlines and removing them with a fill color. By the end you'll know exactly which option to use and why.

Whether you're cleaning up a quarterly review, building a calendar template, or just tired of looking at a grid, the steps below work in Microsoft 365, Excel 2021, 2019, 2016, Excel for the web, and Excel for Mac. The keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same. The menus look almost identical. And once you've done it once, you won't forget where the checkbox lives.

What Gridlines Actually Are (and What They Aren't)

Before you flip a switch, it helps to know what you're switching off. Gridlines are the light grey lines Excel draws between every cell to show you where one cell ends and the next begins. They don't print by default, they aren't part of the data, and they aren't borders. Borders are a formatting choice you apply to specific cells. Gridlines are a display preference that affects the whole worksheet.

That distinction matters because people often think their gridlines are broken when really they've applied a white fill color to a range, which hides the gridlines underneath, or a black border, which sits on top of them. If you toggle gridlines off and lines still appear, you're looking at borders. Toggle gridlines back on and check the cell formatting if you want to be sure.

One more thing: gridlines are a per-worksheet setting, not a per-workbook one. If you turn them off on Sheet1, Sheet2 still has them. Same with print settings. Every sheet inherits the default until you change it. That's a feature, not a bug, but it surprises people who expect one click to clear the whole file.

Method 1: The View Tab Checkbox (The One You'll Use Most)

Open your workbook. Click the worksheet tab at the bottom for the sheet you want to clean up. Then look at the ribbon at the top of the screen and click View. You'll see a group called Show with checkboxes for Ruler, Gridlines, Formula Bar, and Headings. Uncheck Gridlines. The grid disappears immediately.

This is the fastest, most reliable way to hide gridlines, and it's the method most Excel courses teach first. The setting is sticky, meaning it stays off when you save and reopen the file. It's also sheet-specific. If you have a dashboard sheet you want clean and a data sheet you want with gridlines, you can have both at the same time without any conflict.

Want them back? Repeat the steps and check the box again. There's no undo limit, no version dependency, no setting buried in Options. It's just a checkbox.

Method 2: The Page Layout Tab

If you're prepping a worksheet for printing, the Page Layout tab is the better place to manage gridlines. Click it, find the Sheet Options group, and you'll see two columns of checkboxes: one labeled View, one labeled Print. The View column controls what you see on screen. The Print column controls what shows up on paper.

Want gridlines on screen but not on the printout? Leave View checked, uncheck Print. Want a clean screen and clean print? Uncheck both. This is one of those small details that saves you a wasted sheet of paper at the end of a long day, and it works the same way in every Excel version going back to 2007.

If you don't see Sheet Options on the Page Layout tab, your Excel window might be too narrow. Maximize the window or scroll the ribbon and the group should appear. On smaller laptop screens Microsoft sometimes collapses ribbon groups into dropdowns. Click the small arrow under Sheet Options to expand it.

Method 3: Excel Options (For Power Users)

If you want more control over how gridlines behave, dig into File > Options > Advanced. Scroll down to the section labeled Display options for this worksheet. You'll see a dropdown letting you pick the sheet you're configuring, a checkbox for Show gridlines, and a color picker labeled Gridline color.

Uncheck Show gridlines and you've achieved the same result as the View tab method. But the real reason to come here is the color picker. By default Excel renders gridlines in light grey, which can be hard to see on a high-DPI monitor. Change it to navy, dark green, or whatever you prefer, and gridlines become visible without overpowering your data. Some accountants set it to red for sheets they don't want to print, as a visual reminder.

Note that the dropdown shows every worksheet in the active workbook. If you have a file with twenty sheets and you want consistent behavior across all of them, you'll need to apply the change once per sheet. There's no global toggle in this dialog.

Method 4: The White Fill Trick

There's a fourth approach that isn't really hiding gridlines, but it gives the same visual result. Select the cells you want clean. Press Ctrl + A to select the entire sheet if you want. Then go to the Home tab, click the paint bucket icon (Fill Color), and choose white. The gridlines disappear under the fill.

Why would you use this? Mostly because it lets you hide gridlines on a specific range while leaving them visible elsewhere. The View tab toggle is all-or-nothing for the worksheet. With fill color, you can have a clean white block in the middle of a gridded sheet for a chart background or a logo placement.

The drawback: a fill color makes the file slightly larger, the cells are no longer truly empty, and if anyone later tries to apply conditional formatting or a different theme, your white fill will fight with the new format. For most users the View tab is cleaner and safer.

Why Gridlines Sometimes Come Back

You hid the gridlines. You saved the file. You sent it to a colleague. They open it and the grid is back. What happened? A few possibilities.

First, gridlines are saved per worksheet, not per workbook. If you turned them off on Sheet1 but your colleague opens Sheet2 first, they'll see gridlines on Sheet2. The fix is to set the preference on every sheet before saving.

Second, Excel versions older than 2007 sometimes don't honor the setting cleanly. If your file was originally created in Excel 2003 (.xls format) and you've been editing it in Excel 365, save it as .xlsx and the gridline preference becomes reliable. The legacy binary format had quirks around display settings.

Third, shared workbooks and tracked changes can override personal display preferences. If you're in a co-authored workbook in OneDrive, what you see may differ from what your collaborator sees because Excel treats some display settings as user-specific. There's no fix for that beyond using full borders if you need consistency.

Fourth, and this one trips up many Microsoft Excel users: Excel for the web sometimes ignores the saved setting on first load and applies the default until you toggle it manually. Refresh the page and the saved preference usually kicks in. Microsoft has improved this over the past two years but it still happens occasionally.

Finally, watch for templates. If you created your workbook from a template that explicitly enables gridlines, the template's setting will override anything you do in the file unless you save the file as a new workbook. Templates can be sneaky like that.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Power-User Tricks

Once you start hiding gridlines on a regular basis, the mouse path gets old. Here are the shortcuts that turn this into a one-second job.

On Windows, press Alt to activate the ribbon shortcuts. You'll see letter overlays appear. Press W for View, then V for the Show group, then G for Gridlines. The sequence Alt + W + V + G toggles gridlines on or off without touching the mouse. Some users assign this to a custom Quick Access Toolbar button so it's literally one click from any tab.

If you have multiple sheets in a workbook and want gridlines off on all of them at once, right-click any sheet tab and choose Select All Sheets. Then toggle gridlines off using any of the four methods above. The change applies to every selected sheet simultaneously. Just remember to right-click again and choose Ungroup Sheets when you're done, otherwise any data you type into one sheet will be entered into all of them.

For repeatable workflows, record a macro: Developer tab > Record Macro, perform the gridline toggle, stop recording. You now have a one-click button you can add to the Quick Access Toolbar that hides gridlines in any workbook you open. Power users sometimes pair this with a macro that also hides Headings, removes the formula bar, and zooms to fit, creating a single-click presentation mode.

If you spend a lot of time in Excel formulas work and want gridlines on by default but off only for specific sheets, save your blank workbook with gridlines on as a custom template. Any new file inherits the default. Then turn gridlines off manually on individual sheets as you finish them. This matches how most professionals actually work.

Hiding Gridlines for Specific Use Cases

Different jobs need different approaches. A financial analyst building a board pack, a teacher designing a worksheet, and a developer prepping screenshots for documentation all want gridlines off, but for slightly different reasons.

For board reports and executive dashboards, use the View tab toggle plus a quick check in Page Layout to confirm Print is off too. Executives don't want to see grid clutter, and once a PDF is generated and emailed, you can't undo a print mistake. Take a second to verify before exporting.

For invoices and templates, hide gridlines and add explicit borders where you want lines. This gives precise control: bold borders around totals, hairlines between line items, no border at all in margin areas. Templates look more professional when you've chosen which lines exist.

For documentation screenshots, hide gridlines on the active sheet, take your screenshot at 100 percent zoom, and crop tight. Some technical writers also turn off Headings so row numbers and column letters don't appear in the image, giving a fully clean visual.

For raw data export sheets that other people will paste into their own workbooks, leave gridlines on. The recipient will probably copy the data into their own template anyway, and gridlines help them visually parse what you've sent.

Quick Recap

Hiding gridlines in Excel is a tiny change that makes a big visual difference. Four ways to do it: the View tab checkbox for everyday use, the Page Layout tab when you're prepping a printout, the Options dialog when you want to change gridline color too, and the white fill trick for hiding gridlines on just a section of a sheet. The View tab is the one you'll use ninety percent of the time.

Remember the gotchas. Gridlines are per-worksheet, not per-workbook, so turn them off on every sheet you plan to share. Print and screen are separate settings, so check Page Layout before sending a print job. And borders are not gridlines, so if lines still show after you've toggled gridlines off, you're probably looking at cell borders applied somewhere in the formatting.

Once you've done this a few times the muscle memory kicks in. Open file, click View, uncheck Gridlines, done. Most people who learn this trick wonder why they didn't try it sooner. Cleaner sheets, better screenshots, more polished reports, all from a single checkbox.

One last tip many people miss: if you regularly receive workbooks from other teams or clients and you want to remove their gridlines fast, a single keystroke (Alt + W + V + G on Windows) handles it. Combine that with Ctrl + Page Up / Page Down to cycle through sheets, and you can clean an entire workbook in under a minute. Small efficiency wins like this add up across a workday.

And if you ever struggle to figure out whether you're looking at gridlines or borders, here's a quick test. Select any cell and look at the Home tab's Borders dropdown. If borders are applied, the icon will show the configuration. Clear them with No Border and what you see remaining is your gridlines.

That trick alone has resolved hundreds of why won't my gridlines go away support tickets. If you're ready to keep building your Excel skills, the free practice tests linked above cover formulas, functions, charts, and the kind of everyday tasks that come up in real jobs and certification exams.