The Excel page break option helps you see where page breaks will appear when your worksheet is printed. In this article I'll show you several ways to insert them manually or by condition. You'll also learn how to remove page breaks in Excel 2010 - 2016, where to find the Page Break Preview, hide and show the marking lines.

Page breaks are separators that divide a worksheet into individual pages for printing. In Excel, page break marks are inserted automatically according to the paper size, margin and scale options. If the default settings don't work for you, you can easily insert page breaks in Excel manually. It's really helpful for printing a table with the exact number of pages you want.

In this post, I'll show you how to use the Excel Page Break Preview to easily see the changes you make. Also, you'll see how you can adjust the page breaks in the worksheet before printing, how to remove, hide or show page breaks.

If you go to the Print Preview pane and don't like the way your Excel data is laid out for printing across several pages, you can manually insert page breaks where you need them. Below you'll find the steps showing how to do it.

Tip. You can also see where page breaks will appear if you click Page Break Preview Button image on the Excel status bar.

Note. If you get the Welcome to Page Break Preview dialog box, click OK. Tick the Do not show this dialog again check box to avoid seeing this message again.

Tip. On more way of inserting page break in Excel is to go to the Page Layout tab, click Breaks in the Page Setup group and select the corresponding option from the drop-down list.

Note. If manual page breaks that you add don't work, you may have the Fit To scaling option selected (Page Layout tab -> Page Setup group -> click Dialog Box Launcher Button image -> Page). Change the scaling to Adjust to instead.

On the picture below, you can see 3 horizontal page breaks added. Therefore, if you go to Print Preview, you'll see different parts of data on separate sheets.

If you often print your data tables, you may want to learn how to automatically insert page breaks in Excel by condition, for example when a value in certain column changes. Say you have column named Category and you want each category to be printed on a new page.

Below, you'll find several helpful macros and the steps how to add page breaks using the Excel built-in Subtotal functionality.

Below you can find two really useful macros. They will remove all default page breaks in your table and will easily add new marking lines at the appropriate locations.

Just select the range of cells you want to use for splitting and avoid the headers.

If you are novice in VBA, feel free to read How to insert and run VBA code in Excel 2010, 2013 - tutorial for beginners.

Sub InsertPageBreaksIfValueChanged() Dim rangeSelection As Range Dim cellCurrent As Range Set rangeSelection = Application.Selection.Columns(1).Cells ActiveSheet.ResetAllPageBreaks For Each cellCurrent In rangeSelection If (cellCurrent.Row > 1) Then If (cellCurrent.Value cellCurrent.Offset(-1, 0).Value) Then ActiveSheet.Rows(cellCurrent.Row).PageBreak = _ xlPageBreakManual End If End If Next cellCurrent End Sub Sub InsertPageBreaksByKeyphrase() Dim rangeSelection As Range Dim cellCurrent As Range Set rangeSelection = Application.Selection ActiveSheet.ResetAllPageBreaks For Each cellCurrent In rangeSelection If cellCurrent.Value = "CELL VALUE" Then ActiveSheet.Rows(cellCurrent.Row + 1).PageBreak = _ xlPageBreakManual End If Next cellCurrent End Sub

Have you ever thought of Subtotal as of an option for inserting page breaks in Excel? This feature actually makes the process rather easy.

You can delete the rows and cells with totals if you don't need them and get your table with page breaks automatically inserted according to the selected settings.

Though it's not possible to remove page breaks that Excel adds automatically, you can easily delete those you inserted manually. You can choose to remove certain marking line or remove all manually inserted page breaks.

Please follow the steps below to remove a page break in Excel.

Tip. You can also delete a page break by dragging it outside the page break preview area.

If you need to delete all page breaks, you can use the Reset All Page Breaks functionality.

Tip. You can also right-click any cell on the worksheet and select Reset All Page Breaks from the menu list.

One more option you may find helpful is dragging a page break to another location in a worksheet.

Note. After you move an automatic page break, it becomes a manual one.

Below you'll find how to display or hide page breaks in the Normal view

Now you know how to easily turn page breaks on or off in the Normal view.

Now that all your page breaks found the correct location, you can return to Normal view. It's as simple as clicking on the Normal icon under the View tab in Excel.

You can also click Normal Button image on the status bar.

That's it. In this article I showed how to use the Excel page break option. I tried to cover all its options and now you know how to insert, remove, show, hide and move page breaks to adjust them before printing. You've also got several helpful macros to add marking lines by condition and learnt to work in the Excel Page Break Preview mode.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Be happy and excel in Excel!