Reset Excel to default borders

Question

Ok, so you know what a spreadsheet looks like when you open a new on in Excel; the borders are a light blue. These are only on the screen though, if you print the sheet it will not have borders. Say you've applied some various formatting to the sheet (background color, etc.) and those "default" borders are gone. My question is how to you get them back? Simply doing a Clear Formats will not always work.

Specifically I am talking about Excel 2007 but I believe all versions do this.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Ryan

Answer 1

I had this issue, grid lines appeared to be missing on some cells.

Took me awhile to figure out that the color of those cells were white. I clicked format cell, pattern and then selected "no color" (instead of white) The the grid lines were visible again.

I hope this helps others as it took me a while to figure out why.

Answer 2

If you have applied border and/or fill on a cell, you need to clear both to go back to the default borders.

You may apply 'None' as the border option and expect the default borders to show, but it will not when the cell fill is white. It's not immediately obvious that it has a white fill, as unfilled cells are also white.

In this case, apply a 'No Fill' on the cells, and you will get the default borders back.

That's it. No messy format painting, no 'Clear Formats', none of those destructive methods. Easy, quick and painless.