Displaying Page Breaks

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated May 21, 2016)

1

When you are formatting a worksheet, you may want to see where Excel will insert page breaks in your printout. This is easily done by using the Print Preview option or by using the Page Break Preview feature. (Both of these features are covered in other issues of ExcelTips.) You may also want to see the page breaks when you are again editing the worksheet.

Excel can display page breaks as dashed lines between rows or columns on your worksheet. To enable this display, simply follow these steps:

  1. Display the Excel Options dialog box. (In Excel 2007 click the Office button and then click Excel Options. In Excel 2010 or later versions, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
  2. At the left side of the dialog box, click Advanced.
  3. Scroll through the list of options until you see the Display Options for This Worksheet section. (See Figure 1.)

    4. Figure 1. The advanced options of the Excel Options dialog box.

  4. Make sure the Show Page Breaks check box is selected.
  5. Click on OK.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (6182) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is 9 - 8?

2020-01-10 09:51:01

Radshire

Hi Allen,
Is there a keyboard shortcut to toggle the viewing of page breaks when in Normal View?
My firm has recently installed a piece of software over all our Office documents which forces us to categorise them according to confidentiality. Since this has happened, Excel default settings seem to be overridden and the page break dotted lines appear when categorisation of document is selected.
This is clearly a compatibility bug with the added software.....but hope of resolution on this is slim (to none!)
What I need is a way to toggle the page break dotted lines using a keyboard shortcut so that I can remove them quickly.
I guess the only other alternative is to create my own macro to toggle them, but I'd rather avoid adding to the list of such macros I already have!

Many thanks

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