how to add borders in excel

How To Add And Change Cell Borders In Excel

Learning to present the data in your spreadsheets clearly is extremely important. Unclear and poorly laid out spreadsheets are much more likely to contain errors.

Excel contains lots of data validation tools but it is better to get your calculations right first time than it is to rely on Excel catching an error. Obviously the larger your spreadsheet is the more important it is to format the spreadsheet clearly. We cover managing larger spreadsheets in our more advanced Excel courses.

Adding Your First Border

To make data easier to view or to define it you may decide to add borders to your Excel spreadsheet. Here is an example of some of our data without any borders:

Example Data with no borders

Firstly we want to add lines around every single cell so:

Make sure that you are on the 'Home' tab

Highlight the area you want to apply the borders

1. Click the arrow on the button that looks like a little window, this is call the 'Borders' button, this will open up a drop down list.
2. Click on the 'All Borders' choice

Shows where to find the borders options

This will then look like this:

Data now with All Borders

You can also get these Outlines options by right clicking the data and opening the Dialog Box for Formatting Cells.

How to find the Format Cells Dialog Box

Format Cells Dialog Box

Thick Outside Borders – How And When

If you want to show up that the first row is headings, you should put a thicker line around them. To do this you want to use Thick Outside Borders.

Again highlight the cells you want the border around and click on the arrow on the 'Borders'
Click on the Thick Outside Border. This is purely an outer border and will not make of the internal line thick.

Where to find Thick Outside Borders option

Your spreadsheet will then look like this:

Shows the top row with its thick borders

This looks better but still not quite right! To finish it off it needs a thick border around the complete table.

Highlight the whole table and click on the arrow on the 'Borders'
Click Thick Box Border

This has now put a thicker border around the whole thing and just to finish it off I've made the heading text bold. This is how it will look when printed as well.

Shows the table all with thicck outside borders