How to Remove Gridlines in Excel

Gridlines help while you build, but they make a finished sheet look like a spreadsheet rather than a report. Hiding them is the fastest way to make a model feel polished. The setting is simple, with one catch most people miss: it applies to one sheet at a time.

Hide gridlines on screen

The on-screen gridlines are a display setting and changing them does not touch your data or formatting. Excel draws them only to help you see cell boundaries while you work, so turning them off is purely cosmetic and fully reversible at any time.

1. Click the sheet tab for the worksheet you want to clean up.
2. Go to the View tab on the ribbon.
3. In the Show group, uncheck Gridlines.
4. The faint lines disappear immediately for that sheet, leaving a clean white canvas.

Remember it is per sheet

This is the part that trips people up. Unchecking gridlines affects only the active sheet. A workbook with eight tabs needs the box unchecked eight times. To do several at once, hold Ctrl and click each sheet tab to group them, uncheck Gridlines, then right-click a tab and choose Ungroup Sheets so later edits do not ripple across the group.

Control gridlines when printing

Screen gridlines and printed gridlines are separate settings, which surprises people who hide them on screen and still see them on paper. By default Excel does not print gridlines, but if yours do, go to Page Layout > Sheet Options and uncheck Print under Gridlines. The reverse is also true: hiding gridlines on screen will not bring them back on the printout, so a report can look clean on screen and still print with lines unless you check both places.

Clear gridlines everywhere before sharing

When you are prepping a file to send, hiding gridlines tab by tab is tedious. ModelMint's Prepare to Share hides gridlines across the workbook as part of a single pre-send pass that also resets zoom, checks external links, and clears metadata, so the whole file goes out looking consistent in one click.