How to Hide Table Gridlines in Word 2010

If you are seeing a series of horizontal and vertical lines inside one of your tables, then it may not be related to the table borders.

Microsoft Word tables can have gridlines that are meant to help you position objects in and around the table.

but if you find these gridlines to be distracting or unnecessary then you can follow our tutorial below ot learn how to hide table gridlines in Word documents.

How to Enable or Disable Word Table Gridlines

  1. Open your document.
  2. Click inside the table.
  3. Choose the Design tab.
  4. Click the Borders button.
  5. Select the View Gridlines option.

Our guide continues below with additional information on how to hide table gridlines in Word, including pictures of these steps.

There is a difference between borders and gridlines when you are talking about tables in Microsoft Word 2010.

Borders are solid lines that are displayed when you print the document, while gridlines are only shown on screen as a means to show you the structure of the table.

However, if you are editing a Word document or table and find the gridlines to be a distraction, or if you want to see how your table will look when it is printed without those gridlines, it is possible to hide your table gridlines in Word 2010.

You can read our article on how to remove table lines in Word for additional information on this topic.

Hiding Table Gridlines in Word 2010 (Guide with Pictures)

Some of the confusion that exists concerning gridlines is the role that they play in Microsoft Excel vs Microsoft Word. If you want to print cell borders or gridlines in Excel 2010, you can turn on an option in the Page Setup menu called Print Gridlines that allows you to do so. You can read this article about printing page borders in Excel 2010 to learn more about that configuration. But, in Microsoft Word, gridlines are merely guides for the structure of your table and they are not printed. So continue reading below to learn how to go about hiding them.

Step 1: Open the Word document containing the table for which you want to hide the gridlines.

Step 2: Click anywhere inside the table.

This is necessary to display the table-specific menus in the ribbon at the top of the window.

Step 3: Click the Design tab at the top of the window, under Table Tools.

table tools design menu in word 2010

Step 4: Click the Borders drop-down menu in the Table Styles section of the ribbon at the top of the window, then click the View Gridlines option to turn it off.

how to hide table gridlines in word 2010

Now that you know how ot hide table gridlines in Microsoft Word documents you will be able to toggle them on or off as needed, depending on your table needs for a particular document.

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