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Use the Border Tab in Format Cells

August 24, 2023 - by

Use the Border Tab in Format Cells

Problem: Borders drive me insane. How can I take control of my borders?

Strategy: If you want your borders to have the same line color and line style, try the draw borders tools at the bottom of the Border dropdown.

  • 1. Open the border dropdown. At the bottom, choose Line Color, and select a color.

  • 2. Open the border dropdown again. Open the Line Style flyout and choose a line style.

  • 3. Open the border dropdown and choose Draw Border Grid. The mouse pointer changes to a pencil. Click and drag to select a range of cells. Those cells will have your chosen line style and color as borders.

Under Draw Borders, choose a Line Style, and Line Color.
Figure 1281. Use Draw Borders Grid near the bottom of the dropdown.

Gotcha: You can keep dragging the mouse to add borders to other ranges. To exit the Draw Borders mode, press the Esc key.

Four styles of borders: thin black line. Thick red line. Green double-line. Blue dashed line.
Figure 1282. These borders are drawn with Draw Border Grid.

Additional Details: If you choose Draw Border instead of Draw Border Grid, dragging the cursor draws an outline around the range instead of each cell.

Using a blue dashed line as the outline around several cells.
Figure 1283. Draw Border surrounds a range.

Alternate Strategy: To have absolute control over borders, particularly when you want a different style on each side of a border, use the Border tab on the Format Cells dialog.

Strategy: The trick is to select the color and weight before you draw any borders. After you’ve selected a color and a line style, then you can begin drawing borders.

The large white area of the Border tab shows four sides plus a center horizontal and center vertical border. The center borders are enabled only if you are formatting a range of cells. If you are formatting a single cell, you can not choose the center horizontal bar to draw a border through the center of the cell.

You can draw diagonal borders if you use the Border tab of the Format Cells dialog.
Figure 1284. The Border tab of the Format Cells dialog.

Additional Details: You can choose the small buttons around the outside of the white area in the Border tab to select individual border formats. This group also includes diagonal cross-through borders. The diagonal borders cross each cell.

Four cells with thick red border. One of those four cells has thin black diagonal borders, which form an X inside the cell.
Figure 1285. These borders are from the Format Cells dialog.

Gotcha: It would be nice if the color chosen in the Format Cells dialog would carry through to the border tools in the Border dropdown on the home tab. Instead, use Line Color dropdown at the bottom of the Border dropdown.

Problem: I used the fill handle to drag a formula from Row 2 down to all rows. But now a top border is showing in every cell.

Strategy: After dragging, open the on-grid dropdown and choose Fill Without Formatting.

When you drag the fill handle, the borders get copied and don't look good. Open the drop-down that appears after dragging and choose Fill Without Formatting. The other options are Fill Formatting Only, Copy Cells, or Flash Fill.
Figure 1286. Prevent borders from being copied.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Will Francis on Unsplash