How to Remove Borders in Excel for Office 365

Spreadsheets that you receive from other people will often include some formatting choices that they made. People working in Excel often get accustomed to enabling settings and features that make it easier for them to use the program or read their data, but not everyone has the same preferences for these types of settings.

One formatting choice that you may have noticed is borders that have been added to some of the cells in the spreadsheet. Whether these were added to highlight some particular data that is important, or because there weren’t any lines separating cells when the spreadsheet was printed, these borders may not be preferable for the way that you work in Excel. Our guide below will show you how to remove borders from a worksheet.

How to Delete the Borders from an Excel Spreadsheet

The steps in this article were performed in the Microsoft Excel for Office 365 version of the application. Note that borders are different from gridlines. Gridlines are what you see separating your cells when you create a blank spreadsheet. Borders will follow these gridlines when they are added, but the two are separate things. To read more about formatting Excel files, visit Supportyourtech.com.

Step 1: Open your worksheet in Excel.

Step 2: Use your mouse to select the cells with the borders that you want to remove.

select cells with borders

Step 3: Select the Home tab at the top of the window.

click the home tab

Step 4: Click the downward facing arrow to the right of the Borders button, then select the No Border option.

how to remove borders in excel

if the lines that you are trying to remove are still visible, then you likely wish to remove the gridlines instead.

You can remove gridlines by selecting the Page Layout tab, then clicking the box to the left of View under Gridlines.

how to hide the gridlines in excel