How to Adjust Gridlines in Excel Chart
Excel chart gridlines are a helpful guide for your audience, but the default settings often make a chart look busy and unprofessional. Stripping them out entirely can make data hard to read, while leaving them as-is can distract from the story you’re trying to tell. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to add, remove, and fully customize your chart gridlines so they improve your chart’s clarity instead of cluttering it up.
What Are Chart Gridlines, Anyway?
In Excel, gridlines are the horizontal and vertical lines that stretch across the plot area of a chart, extending from the tick marks on the axes. Their purpose is simple: to help the viewer interpret the values represented by the data points, bars, or lines in the chart. Think of them as the faint lines on a piece of graph paper, providing a quick reference to the scale of your data.
Excel offers two main types of gridlines, which you can apply both horizontally and vertically:
Major Gridlines: These are the most common type. They align with the major tick marks and labels on an axis. For example, if your vertical axis is in increments of 10, 20, 30, and 40, a major gridline will extend from each of those points.
Minor Gridlines: These fall between the major gridlines and are used to provide more granular detail. Continuing the example above, minor gridlines might appear at increments of 5, helping you see the values between 10, 20, 30, and 40 more clearly.
Most charts start with Primary Major Horizontal gridlines enabled by default. Mastering how to control these - and the other types - is the key to creating clean, readable data visualizations.
How to Add or Remove Gridlines in Excel
Controlling the visibility of your gridlines is a straightforward process. Excel provides a couple of quick methods to show or hide them.
Method 1: Using the Chart Elements (+) Menu
For modern versions of Excel (2013 and newer), the quickest way to toggle gridlines is by using the Chart Elements button, which appears as a green plus sign (+) next to a selected chart.
Click on your chart to select it. The Chart Elements (+) icon will appear on the top right.
Click the (+) icon to open the Chart Elements menu.
To add or remove gridlines, simply check or uncheck the box next to Gridlines. Unchecking the box removes all gridlines, while checking it adds the default Primary Major Horizontal lines.
To specify which gridlines to show, hover over Gridlines and click the small arrow that appears to the right. This opens a sub-menu where you can select:
Primary Major Horizontal: Standard horizontal lines extending from the primary Y-axis.
Primary Major Vertical: Standard vertical lines extending from the primary X-axis.
Primary Minor Horizontal: More detailed horizontal lines between the major ones.
Primary Minor Vertical: More detailed vertical lines between the major ones.
This menu lets you quickly mix and match to find the combination that works best for your specific chart.
Method 2: Using the Chart Design Ribbon
The more traditional method involves using the top ribbon, which gives you the same options. This path works in all modern versions of Excel and might feel more familiar to long-time users.
Click on your chart. This will cause two new tabs to appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format.
Click on the Chart Design tab. On the very left, find the "Chart Layouts" group and click the Add Chart Element button.
In the dropdown menu, hover over Gridlines.
A new menu will fly out, allowing you to check or uncheck the same set of options mentioned above (Primary Major Horizontal, Primary Major Vertical, etc.).
Using either of these two methods, you can quickly control which gridlines are visible on your chart.
How to Format and Customize the Appearance of Gridlines
This is where you move beyond defaults and truly elevate the design of your charts. Just showing or hiding gridlines is only the first step, customizing their appearance helps integrate them seamlessly into your visualization.
To start formatting, you need to open the Format Gridlines pane. Here’s how:
The easiest way is to simply right-click directly on one of the gridlines in your chart and select Format Gridlines… from the context menu.
This action opens a side pane on the right of your screen with a host of formatting options organized under the "Paint Bucket" icon.
Key Formatting Options Explained
Line Color
The default gridline color is a medium gray, which can often be too stark. A best practice is to choose a color that is just dark enough to be visible but not so dark that it competes with your data.
How to change it: Under "Line," select the "Solid line" option. Click the paint bucket icon next to "Color" and choose a lighter shade of gray or a muted tone that complements your chart’s color scheme. This simple change can dramatically improve a chart's professional feel.
Transparency
Making gridlines semi-transparent is another excellent technique to make them less intrusive. This allows them to provide guidance without overwhelming the data bars or lines.
How to change it: In the same color options, you’ll find a "Transparency" slider. Drag it to the right or enter a value (e.g., 50%) to make the lines fade into the background.
Width
Excel's default line width is often just fine, but you may want thinner or thicker lines depending on your chart's style and size.
How to change it: The "Width" input box allows you to specify the line thickness in points. For a minimal look, try a smaller value like 0.25 pt or 0.5 pt.
Dash Type
Changing from a solid line to a dashed or dotted line is one of the most effective ways to treat gridlines as subtle background elements.
How to change it: Click the "Dash type" dropdown menu. You’ll see a list of choices, from round dots to square dots, dashes, and long dashes. A dotted or finely dashed line is a great choice for both horizontal and vertical gridlines, especially when they need to be present but not prominent.
For example, to create a modern, clean look, you might format your Primary Major Horizontal gridlines to be a very light gray solid line with 50% transparency and a width of 0.5 pt. This keeps them functional without being visually noisy.
Advanced Tip: Controlling Gridline Spacing
Have you ever wanted fewer or more gridlines on your chart? You might have noticed there’s no option for that in the "Format Gridlines" pane. That's because the number of gridlines is not controlled by formatting them but by formatting the axis they extend from.
Gridline spacing is determined by the "Units" setting on the respective axis (vertical axis for horizontal gridlines, horizontal axis for vertical gridlines).
Here’s how to adjust the gridline spacing:
Right-click the axis you want to adjust (for example, the vertical Y-axis to change the horizontal gridlines).
Select Format Axis… from the context menu.
In the "Format Axis" pane that opens, make sure you are in the tab with the bar chart icon ("Axis Options").
Find the section for Units. You will see inputs for "Major" and "Minor."
The number you enter in the Major box determines the distance between the major gridlines. If your data ranges from 0 to 100 and the Major unit is set to 20, you'll get gridlines at 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. If you change this to 25, you'll see fewer gridlines - only at 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100.
The number you enter in the Minor box determines the distance between minor gridlines. If your Major unit is 20 and you set the Minor unit to 5, you will get minor gridlines between the major ones at every 5-unit interval. To see these, you must enable Minor Gridlines from the Chart Elements (+) menu.
This is a critical distinction: the Chart Elements menu and Format Gridlines pane change how your gridlines look, but the Format Axis pane changes where and how many of them appear. By combining both, you gain complete control over your chart's visual structure.
Final Thoughts
Properly adjusting and formatting your chart gridlines in Excel can elevate your data visualizations from default and cluttered to professional and clear. By controlling their visibility, style, color, and spacing, you can guide your audience's eyes and make your data’s story much easier to understand.
Of course, manually building and styling these reports every week or month can feel like a chore. At Graphed, we eliminate that repetitive work. Instead of spending hours in spreadsheets, you can connect your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce - and use plain English prompts to create dashboards right away. We help you go from data to a professional, real-time chart in seconds, so you can focus on the insights, not the formatting.