When you’re printing an Excel spreadsheet, how do you make the gridlines print, too?

This article tells you how to print the gridlines automatically, working in the Page Layout Tab, in Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 (screen shots are taken from Excel 2010).

With your spreadsheet open, go to the Page Layout tab and look to the right to find the Sheet Options area:

In this area, you can tick Print to make the gridlines appear when you print out the spreadsheet.

There are two things to note here:

1.  You can also untick the View boxes so you can’t see the gridlines at all. I’m not sure why you might want to do this, but there it is.
2. If you have used the borders option already to draw borders around some cells, if you print without ticking Print Gridlines, the borders you have added will print anyway; if you tick Print Gridlines, all of the gridlines and borders will print.

Adding customised borders to cells

A quick reminder on adding borders:

Click on the cell(s) you want to add borders to. Click on the Borders drop-down in the Home Tab, Font area:

then choose where you want your borders to go:

More sheet options

You will see that there’s a little arrow in the bottom right corner of the Sheet Options area:

Click on this arrow and the Page Setup dialogue box opens – here you can change a few more options, too, or set your headings to print if you want to, as well as going into the other tabs to change the orientation or margins, etc.:

And that’s it – now you can print the row numbers and heading letters in Excel 2007, 2010 or 2013!

If this has been helpful, please comment below or share the article using the buttons. Thank you!

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