Excel not printing grid lines

Copper Contributor

I'm familiar with what is needed (or, at least, what used to be needed) to print grid the grid lines; I've done it before in previous versions.  (I'm increasingly unhappy with Office 2021 products.  Maybe it is time to go back to 2013.)

 

Settings:

  • Page Setup > Page Layout > Gridlines: checked
  • Page Setup > Page Layout > Draft Quality: unchecked

 

But the lines to not appear in Print Preview (they used to) nor do they appear in the printed output.  The only way I've been able to print a grid is to actually add the borders in the sheet before printing.

 

Anyone found a way to get this to work in Excel 2021?

 

 

2 Replies
What grid line color do you have in File, Options, Advanced? And does it make a difference to select a different printer driver? Or maybe even add an existing printer as a new printer (so it gains its default settings)?

@JKPieterse

Thanks for pointing that one out. Been using Excel for many years and never noticed that -- maybe it is recently added? In any case, it was set to "Automatic" -- which one would assume would have it actually print grid lines if selected -- but I put it to "Black". Then I tried again. Still no grid lines in the print preview or in the printed output.

 

Does this work for you? If you print a page with "Print gridines" enabled, do they print? In my case, the only thing that works is I have to add borders to all the cells. Those print fine. But that wasn't necessary before.  I know that, in earlier versions of Excel, just enabling "Gridlines" on the Page Setup > Sheet tab would cause them to appear in both Print Preview and in the printed output.

 

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