In Word and Excel, you can add borders and shading to paragraphs and worksheet cells, to differentiate them from surrounding content or, in Excel, to indicate a mathematical operation.
To make a paragraph really stand out, you can put a border around it or shade its background. For real drama, you can do both. From the Borders And Shading dialog box or the Borders And Shading panel of the Formatting Palette, you can add borders of various sizes and patterns to any or all sides of a paragraph in a document, or of a cell in a worksheet. With or without a border, you can put a color or pattern behind the text of a paragraph or inside a worksheet cell.
Tip
A paragraph’s formatting is stored with its paragraph mark. If you delete the paragraph mark, thereby making the paragraph part of the following paragraph, its text takes on the formatting of that paragraph. If you position the insertion point anywhere in the paragraph and press Return to create a new paragraph, the new paragraph takes on the existing paragraph’s formatting.
In a Word document, 12 standard border options are available from the Border Type gallery.
Borders that you can apply to a paragraph of text are:
Top Border
Bottom Border
Left Border
Right Border
Outside Border (applies Top, Bottom, Left, and Right borders)
No Border (removes any border that’s been applied)
Additional borders that you can apply to tables and to groups of worksheet cells are:
Inside Horizontal Border
Inside Vertical Border
Inside Border (applies Inside Horizontal and Inside Vertical borders)
All Borders (applies Outside and Inside borders)
Diagonal Down Border
Diagonal Up Border
In an Excel worksheet, six additional borders, most connoting mathematical operations, are available. They are:
Top And Bottom Border
Double Bottom Border
Top And Double Bottom Border
Thick Bottom Border
Top And Thick Bottom Border
Thick Box Border
You can build non-standard borders by clicking multiple buttons. For example, if you want to add borders to the top and bottom edges of a paragraph in a Word document, click the Top Border button and then redisplay the Border Type gallery and click the Bottom Border button. If you decide that you don’t want a border that you added, you can’t remove it by clicking the same button, as you can with some buttons. So if, in the previous example, you wanted to remove the top border and leave only the bottom border, you would need to click the No Border button to clear all the borders, and then click the Bottom Border button again.