Reset Excel to default borders

Question

Ok, so you know what a spreadsheet looks like when you open a new on in Excel; the borders are a light blue. These are only on the screen though, if you print the sheet it will not have borders. Say you've applied some various formatting to the sheet (background color, etc.) and those "default" borders are gone. My question is how to you get them back? Simply doing a Clear Formats will not always work.

Specifically I am talking about Excel 2007 but I believe all versions do this.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Ryan

Solution 1

If you're trying to do this from within Excel (rather than programmatically), follow these steps:

1. From the "Orb" menu on the ribbon, click the "Excel Options" button near the bottom of the menu.

2. In the list of choices at the left, select "Advanced".

3. Scroll down until you see the heading "Display options for this worksheet".

4. Select the checkbox labeled "Show guidelines".

   

Solution 2

I had this issue, grid lines appeared to be missing on some cells.

Took me awhile to figure out that the color of those cells were white. I clicked format cell, pattern and then selected "no color" (instead of white) The the grid lines were visible again.

I hope this helps others as it took me a while to figure out why.

Solution 3

If you have applied border and/or fill on a cell, you need to clear both to go back to the default borders.

You may apply 'None' as the border option and expect the default borders to show, but it will not when the cell fill is white. It's not immediately obvious that it has a white fill, as unfilled cells are also white.

In this case, apply a 'No Fill' on the cells, and you will get the default borders back.

That's it. No messy format painting, no 'Clear Formats', none of those destructive methods. Easy, quick and painless.

Solution 4

My best answer for this is to simply use format painter. This might be a bit of a pain, but it works rather well as the problem you are facing is that Gridlines are covered by fill and other effects that are layered on top. Imagine putting a piece of white paper on top of your grid, the grid lines are present underneath, but they just don't show.

So try:

1. Clicking on a cell in the spreadsheet with the format that you want
2. Under the ribons, go to Home and format painter, it should be a smaller icon near the paste button.
3. Now highlight any cell that you want to apply this format to and it will set the font, color, background etc. to the same as the cell selected. The value will be preserved.

From my experience this is the easiest way to do this quickly. Especially when pasting things in and out of excel.

Again this is not the programmatic way of solving this problem.

Solution 5

Just go to Home> Cell Style > Normal

khir

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Comments

[Cody Gray]

Are you trying to do this programmatically? If so, from which language? Otherwise, it's a setting you can find in "Excel Options", under the "Advanced" tab. Scroll down to "Display options for this worksheet" and check the box labeled "Show gridlines".

[Mark Liu]

This doesn't seem to work though. Imagine the question asker's case where he has filled those cells with say a fill. Which then blocks out the gridlines. This is working as intended, but it is giving the user an uninvited look. Those gridlines are still there, just covered by the fill.

[user1708042]

@Mark Liu I think you can try to fill with "no fill" the cells and the default grid lines appear again