Drawing borders and border grids

- Excel has a number of different techniques for applying borders. Not so well known is the ability to actually draw borders. Let's first of all look at a few standard techniques. In this worksheet right now, we see borders on these cells right here. Now, a typical way to apply borders, let's suppose we wanted to do this here. First of all, I could have copied the format over. That would be even simpler. But if we were applying these borders or we wanted to apply the same borders here that we have over here, we could go on the Home tab to the drop arrow next to Borders.

And we could certainly use any of these features if we were interested. Like right here, All Borders. That will put borders around every single cell. The Outline Border, Outside Borders, maybe that's the one we want. Many times when you apply border features, you can't see the effect of it until you clicked outside of it. Let me press Control+Z to undo that. If you would like to use a simple outline border like that, there is a keystroke shortcut. Let's see it over there in cell K1 referred to. Highlight the data. Control+Shift+7. There too, you don't see what's happening until you click outside of it, but that's easy and handy, easy way to get there.

Let's not overlook those other choices though. We go back here with the data highlighted. Let's go back to this. By the way, another way to get here is by way of Control+1. This activates Format Cells. It doesn't always go to the Border tab. If not, click that. Here, we could apply a number of features at the same time. Color, let's pick a darker color, usually tends to work better. I'll use this color here. Maybe I want this style of border. Then by clicking some of these buttons on the perimeter of our Preview here, for example, here's Outline, we see how that might look.

If we've got multiple cells highlighted, the inner lines we might want to appear as well. I doubt if you want these here, but those are possible too in some situations. I again strongly suggest, I doubt if you'd use those very often. But some other choices here, and we get a preview. We could certainly do that too. At some point, we might want to remove border features. I'm going to highlight all these cells here. You might see this better if you highlight cells that surround it, and then we could remove the borders. We could certainly do this by going back into the drop arrow here or press Control+1.

Go back into Borders that way. But Control+Shift+_, you can also say it as Control+Shift+dash. That gets rid of all border features, regardless of what they are. You'll notice sometimes too that border features do make cells taller, makes the rows taller at times. Now, what if we wanted to draw a border here? We've got two options for doing this. We don't have to select the cells first. Active cell could be anywhere. On the Home tab, we've got the drop arrow for borders. Draw Border, Draw Border Grid.

How about Draw Border? Click there. We see the pen. We can drag across this. That's just a perimeter border. We probably could have done that a lot faster by selecting the cells and pressing Control+Shift+7. But on the other hand, what if we wanted to draw a border with color possibly, or a different line style? By the way, notice that the pen is still active, and it will remain active. So we could do this over here. We could do it up here. So there's some advantage to that perhaps. Up there maybe. And how do we deactivate it? Press Esc. I'm going to press Control+Z to undo some of these.

What if I want to draw a border of a different color? First thing we do, go to the drop arrow for Border, choose a line color. Again, dark colors tend to work best since we have white backgrounds usually. Maybe I'll use dark green here. I've chosen that. What happens now if I draw a green border? Now, you probably can't see that too well. It's not very thick. So we could come back, again clicking the drop arrow. This time, how about a line style? Maybe a thick line now, even though that's black, is it? Are we going to see black or green here? We haven't changed the color, so we see green.

So, a thick border that way. And possibly, you want borders on every single cell. So let's go back again here. Now, we're still talking about green, relatively thick border, but how about Draw Border Grid? All those there, probably overkill, a bit too strong. But you can see what's happening there, and we could do that over here too, of course. Now the other question might be, what would happen if we didn't do that, if we just stopped there? And I'll press Esc. What if we copied the format for these cells? We can highlight this data.

With the right mouse button, we can drag any edge. I'll drag it over to here, let go of the right mouse button, Copy Here as Formats Only. That copied the format as well. So we could approach this in a number of different ways. Again, I'm not making a strong case for saying that's very attractive. In fact, I probably wouldn't do that. But you see how easy it is to draw these. And keep in mind, when you want to get rid of border features, simply highlight the cells in question. You don't necessarily have to highlight the surrounding cells but it doesn't hurt. Highlight the cells in question, Control+Shift+dash, or sometimes called Control+Shift+_ , same keys.

But different techniques here for creating borders and again, the frequently overlooked Draw Border or Draw Border Grid is available. Again, drop arrow here. If you need a specific color ahead of time, choose the line color. It will go back to Automatic here. Coming back again, choosing a Line Style, maybe just a straight line, dotted line, dashed line, whatever. And if the pen's still active, you can create it that way. And sometimes, you'll just come back here and say, "I don't want any borders." We could do it this way too. Now this is the same as the keystroke shortcut but we have to select the data ahead of time.

So if we wanted to get rid of all the borders in the whole worksheet, make sure the pen isn't active, Esc, and just click in the upper-left corner, Control+Shift+dash. All of our borders are gone. So, different techniques here for applying and removing borders. And again, the unusual part for many of you, if you haven't seen it, drawing borders or drawing border grids.