How to Remove Dotted Lines in Excel? 3 Different Cases
(Note: This guide on how to remove dotted lines in Excel is suitable for all Excel versions including Office 365)
There are a lot of times when you might get perplexed with the things that appear when you use some functions or download a file from any database in Excel. One such thing that appears is the dotted lines in Excel.
In this article, let us see how to remove dotted lines in Excel when they appear in three different cases.
You’ll Learn:
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Why Do I See Dotted Lines in Excel?
Before we see how to remove dotted lines in Excel, let us see what they are and all the ways they can appear.
In an Excel workbook split into a multitude of cells, every cell consists of a straight continuous line for the cell border.
But, when you change the layout of the page or change the border of the cells, there appears a faint red dotted line.
Have you ever wondered what causes these dotted lines?
In one case, the dotted lines that appear between cells represent the page break. Unlike Microsoft Word or PowerPoint with clear page breaks, Excel only consists of a continuous range of cells. Here, the page break is presented by the dotted line.
The dotted lines also appear when the border of the cells is set to dotted lines manually. In very rare cases, even the gridlines appear with dotted lines.
Although this has nothing to do with the workbook or any of the operations, the presence of a red dotted line amidst the perfectly aligned cells might be a little annoying.
How to Remove Dotted Lines in Excel?
There are quite some ways to remove dotted lines showing up in the Excel workbook.
Removing Dotted Lines From the Page Break
This is a type of dotted line that appears to show the page break. That is, this line denotes up to which cell the data would be printed on one page and what might be printed on the other page.
There is one straightforward way to remove the dotted lines due to page breaks in Excel.
Just save the document and close the current Excel window. Now, navigate to the file location and open the Excel file. You can see that the dotted lines do not appear.
If you don’t want to close the file and open it, there is another better way to remove the dotted lines.
- Navigate to the File menu.
- Click on Options in the File menu pane.
- This opens the Excel Options dialog box.
- Click on the Advanced option in the category section. Scroll down to the Display Options until you see the Display Option for this Workbook.
- Uncheck the checkbox for Show Page Breaks.
- Click OK.
- This instantly removes the dotted lines from the particular Excel workbook.
Even if you change the layout of the workbook, the dotted lines won’t appear.
Note: This change only applies to the particular workbook. If you want to apply the changes to other worksheets, you will have to go change the preference in each workbook independently.
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Removing Dotted Lines from Borders
It is also expected that a lot of people use dotted lines as borders. If you feel the presence of dotted lines is unnecessary, you can change the dotted borders in the worksheet to solid normal borders.
- To remove the dotted lines in the cells, first, select the cells.
- If all the cells in the worksheet appear with the dotted borders, click on the triangle in the top right of the worksheet, or press Ctrl+A. This selects all the cells in the worksheet.
- Now, navigate to Home. In the Font section, click on the dropdown from borders and select No Border.
Select No Border
- This removes all the cells formatted with a dotted border and makes formats with a normal border.
Removing the Gridlines
Oftentimes, people confuse the gridlines to be dotted lines and want them removed.
To remove gridlines from your Excel sheet, navigate to the View tab.
Under the Show section, uncheck the checkbox for Gridlines.
Once you uncheck it, all the gridlines in the sheet disappear. Removing the gridlines only pertains to that particular worksheet.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the easiest way to remove the dotted lines in Excel?
The easiest and quickest way to remove dotted lines due to page breaks in Excel is by closing and reopening the sheet. If you don’t want to close the sheet, navigate to File> Options>Advanced. Under Display options for this worksheet, uncheck the checkbox for Show Page Breaks.
How to change a dotted border line to a normal solid line?
To change the dotted borders, first, select all the cells with dotted borders. Navigate to Home. Under the Font section, click on the dropdown from borders and select No Border.
What are the reasons for dotted lines to appear in Excel?
There are a variety of reasons why dotted lines appear in Excel. Among them, one of the most prevalent reasons that dotted lines appear is to show the page break. Additionally, the dotted lines also appear when the user has enabled dotted borders or even has the gridlines enabled.
Closing Thoughts
Dotted lines in Excel act as cues and some people might prefer working with dotted lines rather than working with straight borders or even without borders. Depending on the preference of the user can choose to show or hide the dotted lines that appear in Excel.
In this article, we saw how to remove dotted lines in Excel when they appear in 3 different ways.
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Simon Sez IT has been teaching Excel and other business software for over ten years. For a low, monthly fee you can get access to 140+ IT training courses.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
