How to Hide Grid Lines in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets Tip

I’m not a huge fan of Google Documents, particularly their spreadsheets (yes, I am old school with Microsoft) but when you are working in a virtual capacity they definitely get a win for multiple people being able to make changes simultaneously.

Yesterday I was fine-tuning a sheet that a client had created, knowing the document would be sent as a PDF to someone else.  A major downside is that the gridlines show when PDF’d (Can we say icky? Who really wants that to show?)

I turned to the support community and found this super handy javascript that another user created.It worked like a charm!

It’s worth sharing here and will save you time sorting through all the community questions and responses on how to “fix” this.

From the community forum on How to Remove Grid Lines in Google Spreadsheets:

Click on File, Download As, HTML (Current sheet) and then use the following javascript in the web adress bar (overwrite what is in the address bar with the script below). This will then remove all the unwanted gridlines.

javascript:var v=”none”,e=”defaultView”,o=”border”,m=”Color”,w=function(a,b){if(document[e]){if(document[e].getComputedStyle(a,null)[o+b+m]==”rgb(204, 204, 204)”)a.style[o+b]=v}else if(a.currentStyle[o+b+m]==”#ccc”)a.style[o+b]=”none”},q=function(a){a=window.document.getElementsByTagName(a);for(var b=0;b<a.length;b++){var c=a[b];w(c,”Left”);w(c,”Right”);w(c,”Bottom”);w(c,”Top”)}};q(“td”);q(“table”);