Borders and gridlines: Exploring variations, options, and differences

- [Instructor] There are two formatting features in Excel that sometimes are mistakenly used interchangeably, one's called borders, one's called gridlines. Most Excel users, when they work with the data, have gridlines on the worksheet, that's the default setting in Excel. There's a border around this merged cell up top. That's a little bit different. On the worksheet to the left here, there are no gridlines showing at all, but there are border features in effect in a number of different locations. I want to go back to that other worksheet first, suppose I wanted to print this.

I'm going to press Control + P, I'll get a quick print preview here. Now, as I see this, I could be thinking well, where are those lines that I saw as I've been working with the data? I don't see them here. I guess I have to add them. So, press Escape, let's go back into Excel, and let's add borders. How can we do that? Very quickly, within the font group on the Home tab, there's a drop arrow, and we could apply all borders, we've got lots of different choices here, too, but suppose we apply all borders.

Now, those might be stronger than we want, we could've gone to the extent of making them gray, but we didn't. How's our print preview look now? Control + P, well, that could be okay, the lines are a bit strong, but do we really have to do something like this? Do we really have to apply those? No we didn't, press Escape, and actually come back here, press Control + Z to undo that action. We really didn't have to add those borders. Now again, we could have taken the steps of adding gray borders, maybe that would have been okay, but here's what we should have done in that case, press Control + P for the print preview, and before printing, down on the left hand side here, at the bottom, we see Page Setup, and then, there are four tabs here, click the Sheet tab and add Gridlines.

Now here we will see lines around those cells, but they won't be that strong black line, it'll be a more subdued and actually they'll print as a gray line, and there's our print preview, so if we were to print that, that's going to have a reasonable look to it. We probably want to do other things here, too, maybe turn this to be landscape mode, make it bigger, that sort of thing, but for the moment, the focus is just on the presence of those gridlines. Let's jump back into Excel here again, with that arrow in the upper left corner or Escape. Most of the time, we want to see gridlines as we work with data, if you don't want to see them, you can certainly go to the View tab on the ribbon, there is a choice right there, Gridlines, in the Show group, we could turn them off or turn them on, this has nothing to do with printing.

Now, let's go to the other worksheet. Here, there are no gridlines, we could turn them on, I'll turn them on here from that same View tab, if we are trying to use border features and demonstrate how they look, it might be best, for a while, at least, a turn off gridlines. The Gridline option, by the way, is an on or off for the entire worksheet choice, it's not just in certain areas. You could, if you wanted to in certain areas, have the gridlines on, if you made these cells have a white background, you wouldn't see gridlines there, that's probably going farther than what most people would want to do.

I'll jump over to the Home tab here, use the white bucket here, if it's not white already, click that, so there's that effect, too, but let's look at some of these features here. The border that we see right here can be applied easily and quickly with the keystroke shortcut. Maybe I'll apply it right here, it's Control + Shift + 7, sometimes displayed as Control + Shift + &, and is often the case, it looks like maybe nothing happened when we apply a border, but click outside the area, I'm going to click over in column A, and now we see that a border has been applied.

So there's one keystroke shortcut for applying borders, its Control + Shift + 7, and let me press Control + Z to undo, and that's equivalent to going to this borders button right here on the font group, and choosing Outside Borders. There we are, same effect. That's handy, useful at times, we see some other special effects here, here are some borders there that are unusual, there's some here. You can draw borders, you can also apply them by using other techniques available from this drop arrow. Let's remove these borders right here, you can remove borders with a keystroke shortcut, its Control + Shift + Underscore, sometimes described as Control + Shift + Dash, but I'll highlight these cells, and you might see this a little bit more easily, if you highlight cells that surrounded it as well, that you'll see immediately whether this works or not, there we are, so we remove the borders there.

Now, suppose we come back and we want to get a little fancier here, different approaches, let's highlight the data, click that drop arrow next to the border button, and consider not only some of these options, but also, way at the bottom, More Borders. This is a busy dialog box. First of all, we can make a line choice here. Maybe we like that style there, we could change the color if we wish, about red here, and of course, different line styles with the red. Now, if we wanted a border just on the perimeter, we can click Outline, and there's the preview as to how would look, if we want inside borders as well, we could click that.

I doubt if you went inside and not outline, but we could choose none, and then choose inside only, we'd have that look. Let's bring back both. Or we've got other options as well, too, and you could see these one by one without going through every single one here, example, that puts them on the top, that puts them on the bottom, maybe we want just those. So, lots of choices here to explore, and occasionally something like that even, I doubt if you want to use that too often, but that's viable in some cases as well too. So let's suppose we just wanted a red border here, we like the dash line, we want it outside and inside, click OK, and then click outside to see what happened, because we will have an outer border there, and there we see it.

I'm going to undo that. We also have the ability to draw a border. On that same dropper on the font group here, at the very bottom, Draw Border, before doing that, we might want to consider the Line Color, maybe we want to draw a dark blue border, and we can also come back, same button, Line Style, maybe we want to draw thick double line like this, then we could come back and choose Draw Border, and then click and drag to get just a perimeter border like that, and this is still active, so we could draw borders elsewhere if we wish, even on empty cells, if that's going to be appropriate.

At some point, press Escape to deactivate the drawing pen. Once again, I'll press Control + Z a few times to undo those, in addition to drawing a border, you can also draw a border grid, but again, you might want to consider, as you click the drop arrow here, the Line Color you're going to be using, Line Style, let's say I keep them the same, but we could also Draw Border Grid, and this time, I'll drag across these somewhat diagonally, and you see what's happening that way. Remember, the pen stays active until we press Escape.

When we delete borders, remember that keystroke shortcut, Control + Shift + Underscore, maybe I want to delete just the borders in this area right here, Control + Shift + Underscore, that'll do it. Possibly, we'll do these for the entire worksheet, we could click on the upper left corner, Control + Shift + Underscore, all the border features are gone. I'll press Control + Z to undo that, so lots of options for creating these, lots of different styles, if you want to simulate the look of these cells still being within borders, and yet not overwhelm the data, you can apply gray borders.

I'll do it actually on the yellow, I think it'll show up better here, so with these cells selected, clicking the drop arrow here, we go to More Borders, moving the dialog box over, left or right, this time, maybe pick that second gray right there, and then use Inside and Outside. Now you might want to consider the line change over here, but this is the line that's normally used as gridline separator. So click OK, and that's going to be pretty subtle, you might not see that too clearly, I'll zoom in a little bit on this, but you can see what's happening there, so that gives the look of putting in the color and not overwhelming the existing grid lines.

So there are lots of options to experiment here, as you work with the various border features, and remember they're distinctly different from gridlines. If we don't want the gridlines on this worksheet anymore, as by way of the View tab, turn off gridlines, and again, when you are experimenting with different border features, maybe it is best to turn off the grid lines, you'll see the results of your experimenting a bit more obviously.