how to add borders in excel

Microsoft Excel allows you to add a border around cells to make data more visually appealing. With the help of customizable borders and different types of lines of varying thickness, you can enhance the format and layout of the data to make it appear more elegant.

In a spreadsheet, borders make it easier to distinguish the beginnings and endings of datasets and highlight important information.

Types of Borders in Excel

When you go into the dropdown menu of Borders in the Home tab of Microsoft Excel, you'll see various pre-built options available to add borders.

One can divide all available ways to add borders into three different categories. Let's categorize them for better understanding.

1. Adding Border on One Side

The single side borders named as left Border, right Border, top Border, and bottom border falls in the first category. As the name suggests, selecting each option will add the border to the respective side of the cell.

Single side borders are helpful while separating the information across consecutive rows and columns. Let's look at the example below.

Here, adding a Bottom Border to column 3 from cells A3 to D3 helps separate the actual data in columns 4 to 7 from main field names in column 3. Doing this will make the spreadsheet more visually appealing.

1. Select cells A3 to D3.

2. Go to the borders dropdown menu and select the Bottom Border.

Doing this will assign a bottom border to cells A3 to D3.

Let's say you want to add another border to separate column three from two. You will follow the same process of selecting cells A3 to D3 and then adding a border from the dropdown menu. However, you'll have to use the Top Border in this case.

Remember that borders are added to your existing selection. So, once you add a border, it stays there while adding one or more new single side borders to the same selection.

Just like columns, you can separate different rows from each other or individual cells in consecutive rows. You'll have to follow the same process with varying selections of cells.

Below you can see that adding Left Border across cells D3 to D7 separates data in rows C and D.

2. Adding Border Across the Whole Cell

In the second category, four-sided borders, users can add borders to four sides of an individual cell or a group of cells at once, without adding borders to each side individually.

In this category of borders, you have three ways to add four-sided borders across cells, with one option to remove the existing border from one or more cells.

Let's briefly discuss the purpose of each four-sided border option you have in the dropdown menu of the section of the border.

No Border: It helps in removing an existing border from an individual or set of consecutive cells.
All Borders: It adds a border at four corners of a selected range of cells and edges of the adjacent cells.
Outside Border: It only adds a border at the cell boundary without separating the edges of adjacent cells.
Thick Box Border: This serves the same purpose as Outside borders. However, the borderline is of higher thickness.

In the below figure, you can see the application of all four side borders discussed above. There is an All Border around cells A5, A6, B5, and B6 and an Outside Border around cells A9 to D9. Likewise, cell A2 is bordered by Thick Box Border.

You can remove any of these borders using the No Border option. Select any cell or range of cells and click on No Border.

As you can see below, applying No Border to cell B2 and the range of cells from A9 to D9 has removed any existing borders around the cells.

This is an example of the type of control you have in Excel to format how you want the cells to look specifically.

3. Adding Combined Borders

In Excel, you can add other styles of borders like Bottom Double Border, Thick Bottom Border, Top, and Bottom Border, Top and Thick Bottom Border, Top and Double Bottom Border.

The names for these borders are quite indicative. Try them to see how they change the look of your cells, and you can also use them while formatting your next spreadsheets.

More Borders Options in Excel:

Let's explore the More Borders option in its dropdown menu.

Clicking on More Borders will open up the format cells dialogue box. In the Border area of this dialogue box, you can make few tweaks to align borders around your text data in a single place.

With a handful of options available in the Format Cells Border area, you can have more control while formatting the cells more effectively.

You can select the line thickness you want in the borderline, change its color, and align the borders across different locations around the selected cell.

When you make any changes, you can preview the formatting, in the text box shown above, before actually implementing those changes in your sheet. Let's explain few settings with the help of an example.

Suppose you want to add a four-sided red color border to cells A7 to D7 with a thick line as an outline of the border. For that, choose the desired line thickness from the Style area and red color from the Color section.

As you want the border to be across all four sides, select right, left, top, and bottom from the border alignment option below Presets section. Once you select these options, you'll see a preview, as shown below.

Click OK, and it will implement the format in the preview window on your selected cells in the spreadsheet.

Presets Option in Format Cells Dialogue Box:

You can also choose the preset formats in format cells dialogue box to add Outline Border, Inside Border, and None preset to remove an existing border.

Below you can see how Outline Border, on cells A9 to D9, and Inline Border, on cells A10 to D10, have been implemented in the Format Cells dialog box.

Now, you know how each border setting can help you format the cells. Let's remove all existing borders and apply different settings to the whole dataset in one go.

Select the whole range of cells from A3 to D9 and click None preset from the dialogue box or No Border option from the dropdown menu.

Formatting Cells in One Go

Suppose you want to add a thick blue border on top, a thick black border on the other three sides, and a thin black border inside cell edges. The setting will look like this:

Click OK, and in one go, you will format your entire dataset in one go.

Better Format Borders for Visually Appealing Data

These are a few simple ways to format cells better. There is no perfect or best method to format data that you can use every time.

Always keep it simple and adjust borders as needed to make data easier to understand for users. Ignore a lot of colors and thick borders, as they will distract the users. You can also format charts in Excel to make them more appealing to users.

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