How to Remove Dotted Lines in Microsoft Excel

Have you ever been working on an Excel spreadsheet when suddenly dotted lines appeared? While these dotted lines are okay for some, they can be distracting for others. We show you when and why those dotted lines appear and how to remove them.

There are some cases where you can see dotted lines in Excel. If you’re setting up your sheet for printing or using page break preview, you’ll see dotted lines for page breaks when you return to normal view. Additionally, if you share a table with editing rights, a collaborator can add a border with a dotted line style.

How to remove dotted lines in Excel for these situations.

Remove dotted lines after a print preview

If you print your sheet, or just preview it, you’ll notice that when you return to the sheet, these dotted lines will appear. These are indicators of page breaks in your table.

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To remove the dotted lines, go to File > Options.

When the Excel Options window opens, select Advanced on the left. Scroll right down to the Display options for this worksheet section. Uncheck Show page breaks and click OK.

When the options window closes, you should see that the dotted lines have been removed from your spreadsheet.

Follow the same steps for additional sheets in your workbook.

Remove dotted lines after a page break preview

Another time dotted lines appear in an Excel spreadsheet is when using page break preview and returning to normal view. As with the printer preview, you will see lines for the page breaks.

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If you go to the Page Break Preview in the View tab, you will see solid and dotted blue lines indicating the page breaks.

To return to normal view, select Normal on the View tab. You will then see that the blue dotted lines are now black dotted lines and the solid blue lines are solid black lines.

To remove these lines, follow the same steps as above for after a printer setup. Go to File > Options, select Advanced and uncheck the Show Page Breaks box in the Display Options section for this worksheet.

When the options window closes, your dotted and solid page break indicators should be gone.

Changed dotted lines for frames to solid lines

If you share an Excel workbook with others and everyone has editing rights, you might see changes when you reopen your workbook. One of these changes can include borders where there were none before, or dotted cell borders.

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Excel provides several border line styles, including dotted and solid. You can either remove the border entirely or choose a solid line style instead of dotted.

Select the cells that contain the borders. Then go to the Home tab and the Font section of the ribbon. Click the Frame drop-down box.

To remove the borders completely, choose No Border. This will erase the borders of all selected cells.

To change the line style, go down to Line Style in the Draw Frame section of the drop-down menu. Choose one of the solid line options from the pop-out menu.

You can then either select the borders to change with your cursor, which will now appear as a pencil, or select the border style you want from the Borders drop-down menu.

You should see all borders with dotted lines updated to solid lines.

Sometimes it’s those little things that crop up that can be the most annoying, especially when you don’t know where they’re coming from. Now that you know how to remove dotted lines in Excel, let’s see how to remove the gridlines as well.

TIED TOGETHER: How to remove gridlines in Microsoft Excel