How to Remove Dotted Lines in Excel (And What They Are!)

Excel’s dotted lines can help users visualize page breaks and cell boundaries. However, these lines can be distracting and unwanted in certain situations.

In this article, we’ll explore what dotted lines are in Excel and provide a simple guide on how to get rid of them 💪

So, if you’re tired of seeing those pesky dotted lines in your spreadsheet, keep reading!

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What does the dotted line mean?

In Excel, a dotted line refers to the page break line that appears on the screen when you insert page breaks.

These dotted lines indicate where the page breaks will occur when you print the worksheet 🖨️

They are also used to show the borders between cells and can be helpful for visualizing the layout of your data.

Dotted lines can occur for a variety of reasons. It may be due to page breaks or cell borders.

However, in some cases, the dotted lines can be distracting or unwanted. And you may want to remove them from your worksheet.

We will discuss two quick methods of removing page breaks from an Excel worksheet below.

Method #1: Get rid of dotted lines by restarting Excel

An easy but not very sophisticated method of removing dotted lines is to restart Excel. Simply close the workbook and open it again 📗

This will solve the problem as Excel will remove the dotted line borders and present a new worksheet.

Method #2: Remove page breaks from settings

You can also remove page breaks from the settings. To do that,

  1. Select File.
Go to File Tab to remove dotted page break lines
  1. Go to Options at the bottom.
Go to Microsoft Excel options to break dotted line border
  1. Select Advanced.
Advanced option - why dotted lines breaking
  1. Under the section Display options for this worksheet, uncheck Show Page Breaks.
Unmark page breaks that breaks dotted lines

The dotted cell borders will now be removed as the page breaks have been disabled ❌

Note that these settings are saved for the current worksheet only. If you want them to appear on another worksheet, you will have to perform the above steps again.

That’s it – Now what?

In this article, we saw what dotted lines are in Excel. We also saw the steps necessary to remove dotted lines from the settings ⚙️

Unlike solid lines in Excel, dotted lines show page breaks. These are faint gray-colored lines that show where the page will break when printing.

Although dotted lines can be really helpful, for some people, they can be annoying. Using the above two methods, you will be able to remove dotted borders in a couple of seconds.

Similar to the dotted border, Excel has a bunch of other features and tools. The most important of which are Excel functions ➗

Our favorite functions include the IF, SUMIF, and VLOOKUP functions. You can learn them for free in my 30-minute free email course. So sign up now!

Other resources

Did you enjoy reading this article? If yes, then you’d love to read more.

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