An Excel worksheet is separated into pages prior to printing. A page break is the line divider that marks the edges of each page. There are two types of page breaks: solid lines that are manually added page breaks, and dashed lines that are automatically added by Excel.
Figure 1. Sample Page Break
The automatic page breaks are inserted by Excel based on several settings such as margin, scale, paper size and the manual page breaks that we insert.
Before we learn how to remove page breaks, let us first have an overview of page breaks and how we insert them in Excel.
Page Break Preview
In order to view the page breaks in our Excel file, we simply click the Page Break Preview at the bottom of the window.
Figure 2. Page Break Preview Button
Another method to display the Page Break preview is by clicking the View tab then the Page Break Preview command.
Figure 3. Page Break Preview in View tab
Below window is the Page Break preview, where there are blue lines defining the edges of the page and the rest of the background is in gray area.
Figure 4. Page Break Preview
Insert Page Breaks
Page breaks can be manually inserted through the following procedure:
- Select the cell where we want to add page breaks. Remember that page breaks are added above and to the left of the cell that we select.
Example:
Select cell C5 as shown below and click Page Layout tab > Breaks button > Insert Page Break command
Figure 5. Insert Page Break Command in Page Layout
The resulting preview shows that one page break is added above cell C5 and one to its left. Hence, we now have four pages after inserting the page breaks.
Figure 6. Output: Insert Page Breaks
Remove a page break
These 2 steps show us how to remove a page break:
- Select the cell below or to the right of the page break we want to remove. Suppose we want to remove the vertical page break in the middle of the image below. We select any cell from D11 to D16, in order to delete the page break directly to its left.
Figure 7. Selecting the Page Break to Remove
- Click Page Layout tab > Breaks button > Remove Page Break command
Figure 8. Output: Remove Page Break
Notice that the solid line was removed, but a new dashed line is inserted. The newly added line is automatically inserted by Excel and cannot be removed. We can only delete the manually added page breaks that are in solid lines.
Another Example:
Remove the page break in between pages 5 and 6. To do this, we must select the cell directly below the page break which is either E10, F10 or G10.
Figure 9. Example 2: How to Remove a Page Break
Follow the same procedure in removing page breaks and this is the result:
Figure 10. Final Result: Remove Page Break
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