Adding Page Borders to a Printout

Alan uses Excel frequently for creating printouts that are used by others. He likes to include borders on the final documents to give them a professional appearance. Alan knows how to invoke page borders in Word, but there isn't a similar feature in Excel. Lacking this he has resorted to manually inserting borders on cell ranges to get the appearance he wants. This works OK if the printout is a single page, but it isn't too great when Alan has multi-page printouts. He wonders if there is some way to add page borders automatically in Excel.

There are a couple of ways you can approach creating page borders for an Excel printout, but none of them are automatic. One way is to rely on your printer. Some printers have the ability to add borders automatically around the border of a page. This, of course, is outside the control of Excel. You can find out if your printer has such capabilities by displaying the Printer Options dialog box for your printer (accessible through the Print dialog box or from the printing options page displayed by pressing Ctrl+P) and poking around through the options visible there.

Another approach is to create an image of your border using your favorite graphics program and save it as a JPG, PNG, or TIF file. (You could actually use several other image file formats, but these are ones typically supported by all the graphics programs.) In Excel you can then, within the header, insert the picture of the border. Format the picture to adjust the image size so it covers your whole page.

There are also third-party solutions available. Two that have come highly recommended by some subscribers over the years are Asap Utilities (https://www.asap-utilities.com) and Fine Print (https://fineprint.com/fp/). Both allow you to create borders rather easily.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (8185) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Excel in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Adding Page Borders to a Printout.