The gridlines in an Excel spreadsheet are only shown when looking at the worksheet electronically, and are not displayed when you send a worksheet to a printer.

However, sometimes you might want to hide gridlines in Excel worksheets when they are viewed electronically. Two different ways of doing this are described below.

De-Select the Gridlines Option

The display of the gridlines of an Excel worksheet are controlled by the Gridlines option, which is switched on by default.

Therefore, if you want to hide the gridlines in Excel, you simply need to deselect the option, which can be found as follows:

• The Gridlines option is found in the View tab (see right)

• Select Tools→Options...
• The Gridlines option is located in the View tab of the window that pops up (see right)

Fill Cells With a Background Color

To color the cell background, select the cells that you want to hide the gridlines on, and click the arrow at the side of the Fill Color button, which is located on the formatting toolbar in Excel 2003, and on the 'Home' tab in more recent versions of Excel.

This gives you a selection of colors that you can use to fill the background of the selected cells (see above right). If you select white as the fill color, this will give the appearance of simply removing the gridlines on your worksheet.