After upgrading to Microsoft Office 2016, I noticed that the printed gridlines on Excel worksheets are much thicker than in Office 2011 Excel. They looked awful!
Improving the printing turned out to be a simple fix — once I figured out what to change. Here’s how:
Go into Excel > Preferences and then click the View option.
The Gridlines color is set to Automatic. This is where you make the change.
Click on the Gridlines popup menu and change the color from Automatic to a medium gray. Then close the Preferences window.
You won’t notice too much of a difference in Excel’s display window, but when you print the worksheet, its gridlines will be lighter and appear thinner. Much improved, in my opinion!
12/1/16 Update!
I have been getting “Not enough memory” error messages in Excel 2016 for Mac. I finally figured out that changing the sheet’s gridline color is what’s triggering this condition! I’m hoping Microsoft can (finally) fix this.
Yay! Thank you so much. Those thicker gridlines were really bugging me!
Thank you, I’ve been searching for an answer to this for ages!
Did that except I selected an orange color rather than the light gray. When I saved the worksheet, I see a warning, ALERT Not enough memory. Yet I can close it with the color preserved, no problem in saving and printing with the selected gridline color. Why the Alert?
For some reason, Excel has a software bug that’s triggered when you change the gridline color. Not sure why they haven’t fixed it yet!
This action makes the grid lines lighter but also affects the borders on the spreadsheet. I also like how the “print grid line” option is now buried in the “margins” dialogue box. Very intuitive.
There’s also a checkbox for it buried in the Page Layout ribbon tab.
This was very helpful, thank you. I had to do this for each sheet in my workbook. If I’m using Excel>Preferences, shouldn’t that be a global change? This means I have to make the change every time I open a new sheet/workbook.
Unfortunately I don’t know of a way to change this permanently. I do it for each Excel document that I expect to print.
Thanks for this., but have done it before. Unfortunately, while gridlines print fine and discretely pale grey, the outline round the whole sheet is really thick black and very intrusive. Please can you help.
Yes!! Thank you for figuring this out. Those heavy grid lines were really frustrating me.