Let’s take a look. Before you apply borders, you may want to turn off the gridlines that appear by default in Excel. This will make it easier to see the borders you create. You can turn off gridlines by unchecking Gridlines on the Layout tab of the ribbon. To apply a border, first select the cells you’d like to add borders to. Then, open the Format Cells dialog box and navigate to the Border tab. Applying a border is a three-step process. First, select the line style that you’d like to use for the border. Excel provides a number of different line styles and weights. Second, select the color that you’d like to use for your border. Third, select the location of the border. You have the option to add a border to the top, bottom, left, and right of the current selection, and also the option to add a border between rows and columns. Finally, you can add lines that run diagonally across cells. To apply the border, you can either click the buttons for each option, or click directly in the border preview area. In each case, click once to enable the border, and click again to disable the border. The Border tab also contains border presets. These are shortcuts to quickly add more than one border setting at a time. The None preset will clear all borders in one click. Use this option to reset borders before adding new ones. The Outline preset places a border around the outside edge of currently selected cells. The Inside preset adds borders between cells, both horizontally and vertically. Note that each border you apply uses the current line and style selection. This makes it possible to apply different kinds of borders to the same cells. For example, by switching the line style and weight, we could add a heavy gray border around all cells and a thin gray dotted border between all cells.
Dave Bruns
Hi - I’m Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.
