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How to Add Gridlines in Google Sheets

Sometimes you need to be able to customize the appearance of your google spreadsheet so you can make data easier to read.

Adding gridlines and borders around your cells is a great way to make data easier to look at.

You can select a specific range of cells to add borders around, you can add them to your entire sheet.

In this tutorial, we are going to cover how to add gridlines and borders to your sheet.

Table of Contents

How to Add Gridlines

Adding gridlines to your sheet is very easy. Usually, these are already in your sheet by default.

If they are not already added, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Select View from the top menu
  2. Select Gridlines
  3. This will add gridlines to your entire sheet. If you want to remove them, you would repeat the steps and uncheck gridlines

Adding Gridlines

Gridlines are usually enabled by default in google sheets. If you want thicker lines around your cells, you want to add borders

How to Add Borders

Gridlines are barely visible. If you want to outline your cells with something more visible, borders are the way to do it.

Here’s how to add borders to your sheet:

  1. Select the range of cells you want to add borders to. Click and drag to highlight the cells (You can click the top left corner or press: CTRL + A on your keyboard to select all)
  2. Navigate up to the borders tool in the top menu.
  3. Select all borders if you want borders around every cell.

Adding Borders

The borders tool has many other options if you just want to outline your cell range or add lines in specific places only. Try playing with all the option in the tool to understand what they each do

How to Change Border Thickness and Color

If you want to increase the thickness of the border or change the color, you have many customization options to do that in google sheets.

Here’s how it’s done

  1. Select the borders tool from the top menu
  2. If you want to change the border color, select the borders color tool and choose the color you want
  3. If you want to change the border thickness, select the borders style tool and choose the thicker line option

Border Color and Thickness

With the borders style tool you have many option for line thickness and dashed or dotted lines

Closing Thoughts

Customizing the gridlines and borders in your sheets can help you format data and make it much easier to read.

This is definitely something all spreadsheet beginners should take the time to learn!

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
Changing Font Format
Using Format Painter
Importing and Exporting Excel Files
How to Turn on Dark Mode