Have you ever jumped back to normal view from print preview and noticed the annoying page break lines? They look distracting. They are like a naughty kid shouting for attention. look at me!!!

How do we get rid of those lines after completing our business with print preview?!?
Very simple. We just copy everything, press CTRL+C and then paste in a new workbook!
Of course, I am kidding. There is a better way.
You can click on Office button > Excel Options > Advanced > Scroll down to “Display options for this…” and then un-check Show Page Breaks option.
Aah, it would be much more simple to take a flight, go to Colombia, visit a coffee estate, gather beans, bring them back home, roast and ground them and make a coffee.
But then, we are not after Coffee. We are after those nasty print preview lines.
So here is a much simpler option to get rid of them, on click of button.
We just write a macro.
- Press ALT+F11 in your workbook to go to Visual Basic Editor (VBE).
- Now, locate Personal macros workbook in the project explorer. Just open the macros module (or insert a new one). [more on this here]

- Write a single line macro like this:
Sub disablePageBreaks()
ActiveSheet.DisplayPageBreaks = False
End Sub - Save your personal macros workbook.
- Come back to Excel (ALT+F11 again).
- Add this macro as a button to Quick Access Toolbar

- Now, you can just press the QAT button or use the relevant ALT shortcut (for eg. if the macro button is 4th one in QAT, you can just press ALT+4 to run it).
That is all. Now with all the saved time, you can go to Colombia for a cup of coffee. Make sure you bring me a kilo of that Juan Valdez beans.
More on Printing:
If you like to print and hurt a few trees, make sure you have read these.














11 Responses to “Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]”
@Chandoo:
One more useful trick.......
In a column you have no. of data in rows and need to copy in the next row from the previous row, no need to go for the previous rows but entering Alt + down arrow, you will get the list of data, (in asending order), entered in the previous rows...
This is another great tip. I use this all the time to make sense of some *very* long formulas. As soon as the formula is debugged I remove the break.
Great tip Chandoo!
I use this feature often and it has even gotten the, "how did you do that" response.
Thanks!
@Ketan: Alt+down arrow is an awesome tip. I never knew it and now I am using it everyday.
@Jorge, Tony: Agree... 🙂
[...] Day 1: Insert Line Breaks in a Cell [...]
how can we merge a two sheet.
excellent idea. Chandoo you are genious
Hi chandoo,
I have used ctrl+enter to break the cell. But I did not get the result.
Please tell me how can i break the cell in multiple lines.
Hi, Ranveer,
Its not Ctrl+enter to break the cell, use Alt+Enter to make it happen.
hi Chandoo....
how we can use Alt+Enter in multiple rows at the same time please reply hurry i have lot of work and have no time and i m stuck in this. 🙁
Alt+J worked once 🙁
So I found another more reliable way:
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),"")
Where A2 is the cell that contains the line breaks which the code for it is CHAR(13). It will replace it with whatever inside the ""