The spreadsheet developer has fairly strong control over the outline of each cell in the document. This begins with controlling the darkness of the lines and extends to the thickness, color, and style of the lines. Primarily the adjustment of cell borders advances the aesthetics of the document, but also may include some functionality by setting apart certain cells on the printed document as well as the screen document.
Gridlines
The borders of the cells of a spreadsheet document will always be viewable on the screen. However, the default setting is to NOT print the borders on paper. The choice of printing the gridlines must be activated.
If you want the gridlines to be printed, you must change the default setting. This change is found in the Page Setup under File in the Menu.
The
Page Setup wizard lets you make many adjustments to the document.
The gridelines change is located on the Sheets Tab.
You need to check the blank gridlines box to instruct Excel to print the cell borders.
Clicking in this box is the way to cut on and off the printing of gridlines.
When you are satisfied, you would click on OK.
When printing, Excel will print all borders of cells from the "top" of the document to the lowest cell containing data.
Hint: To get a blank page of gridlines, enter a "spacebar" character somewhere around cell H51 or I51. Depending on the margins you have set and the width of the columns, this will fill a page with a grid when you print.
Border Panels
Excel offers two different Border Panels for your use. The first contains ALL of the adjustments you can make and the second offers the more popular adjustments in a convenient place.
First
select a cell or block of cells that you want to change the border look.
Then you select Format + Cells from the menu to display the Format Cells wizard shown here.
Click on the Border tab to display your options.
Note you can control the style and color of your buttons from this Border Panel.
The Presets allow you to select to darken the entire border, all of the internal borders in a block of cells selected, or to remove all border changes and restore the borders to their original condition. In this example, the Presets would indicate the selected cells have no border adjustments active and the original selection of cells contains no internal cells (probably a single cell was selected). You could click on the Outline button to darken the border on the selected cell.
The following example shows the effect of selecting a block of cells and applying two different border techniques from the Presets of the Border Panel.
The top example shows the Outline button will darken the border of the block of cells that were selected. The bottom example shows what happens when both the Outline and the Inside buttons are selected.
The Color panel gives you several options for displaying the border. Below are a couple of colored borders to give you an idea of the visual options available in Excel.
Example A shows a Red border around a block of cells (Outline). Example B shows a Blue block of cells (Outine and Inside).
If you would like to have the border displayed in one of the different Styles offered, first click on the style and then select the border adjustment button of choice. Here are two examples to begin to give you some ideas.
Many people will not want all of these formatting features, but simply wish to darken one or more sides of the selected cells. The border buttons found on the Border Panel above are also found from the Button Panel above the document on the Toolbar set of buttons. These buttons work the same way regardless of how you access them. Let's find the border button on the document screen.
The
immediate access is found on the toolbar next to the paint
bucket. The down-arrow next to the borders button gives
you all of the choices.
If you follow across the top row, the choices are to remove all border formats, darken the bottom of the cell, darken the left side of the cell, and darken the right side of the cell.
The choices on the remaining two rows are fairly obvious. The button with the + will darken all borders in a selected block. The two remaining buttons give you different "thicknesses" of darkness around the border of the selected cells.
The best way to get to know what these buttons will do to the cell border is to experiment. You will find different visual effects that you like and some that you probably don't like.
Comment: One particular useful way to achieve a nice looking printed document is to turn off the printing of gridlines. Then, when you want a border to appear, use your border format buttons to put a dark outline around the cells containing data that needs to be setoff from the rest of the document as in column headings, titles, etc.
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