Strikethrough in Excel: Ctrl+5, and the Tick Marks That Survive a Review

How-to · Updated July 2026 · ~18 min read

A reviewer opens last month's bank reconciliation. Forty of the two hundred statement lines are crossed out. She asks the only question that matters — who cleared these, when, and against what — and the file cannot answer. Strikethrough is paint. It does not sum, it does not filter, no worksheet function reads it, it is absent from any CSV you send as support, and it carries no name and no date. The preparer did the work; the workbook kept no evidence that the work happened.

Ctrl+5 is the shortcut — the 5 on the number row, Cmd+Shift+X on a Mac — and the first half of this post covers every way to apply it, remove it and find it, because you do still want the markup layer. But an accountant needs the line to mean something. The rest of the post builds the second layer: a status column that holds the fact, a sign-off column that holds who and when, and a conditional formatting rule that draws the line only once both are filled in, so a half-cleared item looks half-cleared and the reviewer can count, filter and sample what the preparer actually did.

There is also a recovery procedure here, for the file you inherit where somebody crossed 137 lines off and recorded nothing. Find by Format will select all 137 at once, which turns a year of paint back into data in about a minute — and tells you honestly which part of the evidence is gone for good.

Layer one: Ctrl+5, and the three reasons it does nothing

Select any cell, range, row or entire column and press Ctrl+5 on the number row. Excel toggles the strikethrough effect on the font of every selected cell. On a mixed selection — some struck, some not — the first press applies it to all of them and the second clears all of them.

When nothing happens, it is nearly always one of these:

1. You pressed 5 on the numeric keypad. The keypad sends a different key code, and Ctrl plus keypad-5 is not the shortcut. Use the 5 above the letters.
2. You are in edit mode. With the cursor blinking inside a cell or in the formula bar, the shortcut is unreliable across versions. Press Esc first, or use Ctrl+1 (see the partial-cell section, which is exactly where edit mode is useful).
3. The sheet is protected. Formatting cells is a permission, not a given. Check Review tab > Unprotect Sheet, or ask whoever protected it to allow "Format cells" in the protection options.

One more, less common: in Excel for the web the browser sometimes claims the keystroke. There, use the strikethrough button in the Home tab > Font group instead — as of 2026 the web version has one, which the desktop version, oddly, does not. Ribbon layouts shift between builds, so if you cannot see it, check the current Microsoft help for your version.

That is the markup layer, and it is worth having: a crossed-out line reads instantly on screen and on paper, and no status column replaces that. What it is not is a record. Everything from the tick-mark section onwards is about the second layer — the columns that hold what the line is standing in for — and the rule that draws the line for you once those columns are filled in.

Format Cells: the route that always works

The shortcut is a front end for a checkbox in a dialog, and going to the dialog directly never fails:

1. Select the cells.
2. Press Ctrl+1, or right-click the selection and choose Format Cells.
3. Go to the Font tab.
4. Under Effects, tick Strikethrough.
5. OK.

The Preview box shows the result before you commit. While you are in there, the two other Effects — Superscript and Subscript — share the same box, and the Colour dropdown is worth a visit: crossed-out text in mid-grey (More Colors or the 25% grey swatch) reads as "dealt with" far better than crossed-out black, which just looks like a mistake on the printout.

Give the mark a name: a firm-wide cell style, not a keystroke

Before you make the mark faster to apply, make it mean the same thing to everyone who applies it. Excel has no tick-mark object and no legend. The nearest thing it has is a named cell style, and naming the mark is what stops two preparers' crossings-out meaning two different things on the same schedule:

1. Home > Cell Styles > New Cell Style.
2. Name it for what it asserts — Cleared, Superseded, Immaterial — not for what it looks like.
3. Click Format, set the Font tab to Strikethrough plus grey, then OK.
4. Repeat for the others, varying the colour so the three are distinguishable at a glance.

Anyone working in the workbook now applies the same look in one click, one edit to the style definition updates every tagged cell at once, and clearing it means applying the Normal style rather than guessing at which formatting to undo. Three defined styles with fixed meanings, listed in a legend cell at the head of the schedule, is the difference between markup a reviewer can interpret and markup she has to ring you about. It is still only paint — no formula reads a cell style either — but it is at least paint with a stated meaning, which is the first of the five things the next section is about.

Word has a strikethrough button. Excel's Home > Font group, in current desktop builds as of 2026, has Bold, Italic and Underline, and stops. If you apply the mark by hand all day, add it yourself. The Quick Access Toolbar is the better home because it earns a keyboard shortcut of its own:

1. File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar (or right-click the ribbon and choose Customize Quick Access Toolbar).
2. Set Choose commands from to All Commands.
3. Scroll to Strikethrough, select it, click Add, then OK.

The button now sits on the QAT, and pressing Alt reveals its position number — if it landed fourth, Alt+4 applies strikethrough from anywhere. That number shifts if you add or reorder QAT items later, so re-check it after any reshuffle.

If you would rather have it on the ribbon proper: File > Options > Customize Ribbon, select the Home tab, click New Group, rename it, then add Strikethrough to it from the All Commands list. You cannot add commands to a built-in group — a custom group is the only way.

Whichever route you take, note what you have built: a fast way to apply a mark that Excel itself cannot read back. That is fine for the markup layer and fatal as a record.

Striking through part of a cell — and why not to build on it

Character-level formatting only works on text constants. If the cell holds a number, a date, or a formula, Excel will only format the whole cell — there is no way to strike three characters of a formula result.

For a text cell:

1. Double-click the cell (or click into the formula bar) to enter edit mode.
2. Drag to select just the characters you want crossed out.
3. Press Ctrl+1 — in edit mode this opens a cut-down Format Cells dialog with only the Font tab.
4. Tick Strikethrough, then OK, then Enter to commit the cell.

This is how you cross out "superseded by JV-0412" inside a journal narrative while leaving the journal number itself standing, or strike the old purchase-order reference in an invoice notes cell without losing the invoice number beside it. Four warnings before building a process on it: partial formatting is lost the moment the text passes through a formula, since =CONCAT(A2," ",B2) returns plain characters with no memory of the crossing-out; it survives an ordinary copy-paste but is stripped by Paste Special > Values; it disappears in CSV, which carries no formatting at all; and it cannot live on a sheet that a Power Query refresh writes to, because a refresh rewrites the cell's contents and the character-level formatting goes with them.

What a paper tick mark did that a crossed-out cell does not

The tick mark on a paper working paper was never just a tick. It came with a legend at the foot of the schedule: a symbol, and beside it what the symbol asserted — agreed to bank statement, agreed to supplier invoice, recalculated, not applicable, exception noted. The preparer initialled the schedule and dated it. Anyone picking the file up a year later could read the legend, count the marks, pull three of them and test whether the assertion held.

Line up what that carried against what a crossed-out cell carries:

• A defined meaning. The legend said what the mark asserted. A line through a cell says only that somebody did something to it, and two preparers on the same file may well mean two different things by it.
• A preparer. Initials, written on the schedule. A strikethrough carries no name — the workbook's file properties tell you who last saved the file, not who struck which line.
• A date. Written at the top of the sheet. A strikethrough carries none, so nothing in the file distinguishes an item cleared before the cut-off from one cleared on the morning the pack went out.
• Portability. A photocopy of the schedule kept the marks. A CSV, a values-only paste and an export bound for an ERP all keep none of them.
• Countability. You could count marks by eye on a page of forty lines and agree that count to the schedule. Excel will not count them at all, at any length.

None of this is an argument against crossing lines out. It is an argument for putting those five things somewhere Excel can read, and letting the line be drawn from them rather than standing in for them.

Formatting is not data: five ways it fails you

Strikethrough changes nothing about the value underneath, and that catches people out in five specific ways:

• SUM does not skip it. Cross out an invoice line and the total below is unchanged. Only hiding, filtering with SUBTOTAL, or removing the row changes an arithmetic result.
• You cannot filter or sort by it. AutoFilter offers Filter by Color for fill and font colour; there is no "filter by strikethrough".
• No worksheet function reads it. There is no CELL("strikethrough",A2). A VBA user-defined function can return Range.Font.Strikethrough, but formatting changes do not trigger a recalculation, so the result goes stale the instant someone toggles a cell and it stays stale until the sheet is forced to recalculate. It is a trap dressed as a solution.
• It does not travel. Save the sheet as CSV, paste it into another workbook as values, or shape the table for an ERP import, and the strikethrough is simply not in the file that leaves your machine. The pack the auditor or the client opens is the pack without the marks.
• A query refresh wipes it. Manual formatting applied to the cells of a Power Query output table is not reliably preserved when the query reloads — the rows are rewritten, and they need not land where they were. A conditional formatting rule applied to the range survives, because it re-evaluates against whatever arrives. If the sheet is fed by a query, hand-striking rows on it is work you will be doing again next month.

The conclusion an accountant should draw: never let a crossed-out line be the only record that something is cleared, reconciled or done. Put the status in a cell as a value, and let the strikethrough be a consequence of that value. Which is exactly what the sections after the next two build.

Removing strikethrough in a file you inherited

"It won't come off" is the second most common strikethrough question, and it is usually asked about somebody else's workbook — the prior-year file, the template a leaver built, the schedule a client sends every quarter. The fix depends entirely on how the line got there, and you cannot tell which it was by looking at it.

The conditional formatting case is the one that wastes an afternoon. A CF rule re-evaluates every time the sheet recalculates, so manual removal appears to work and then the line reappears — or never goes at all. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules, change Show formatting rules for to This Worksheet, and read what is actually applied to that range. Delete or edit the rule there.

Note also that Clear Formats is a blunt instrument: it strips number formats, borders, fills and alignment along with the strikethrough, so on an accounting schedule you lose your currency formatting too. For one cell that should match its neighbours, the Format Painter (Home > Clipboard) from a clean cell is safer.

Recovering a colleague's markup: turning 137 struck lines into data

The harder inherited-file problem is not that the strikethrough will not come off. It is that the strikethrough is the only record of a month's work, and you now have to turn it into something a reviewer can use without re-performing the whole reconciliation yourself. Excel can search by format, and that is the lever:

1. Ctrl+F, then click Options >>.
2. Click Format, go to the Font tab, tick Strikethrough, and OK.
3. Leave Find what empty and click Find All.

Every matching cell is listed, each with its address in the Cell column, so the results pane is itself a readable list of which rows were struck. Click any result to jump to it, or press Ctrl+A inside the results list to select all of them at once — at which point Ctrl+5 clears the lot.

Do not clear them yet. With all 137 still selected, write the fact down first:

1. With the found cells still selected, apply a fill colour — Home > Font group > Fill Color, any colour the sheet does not already use. This is a temporary marker that Excel can filter on, which strikethrough is not.
2. Turn on AutoFilter (Ctrl+Shift+L) and use Filter by Color on that column, so only the struck rows remain visible.
3. Select the status column across the filtered range — say E2:E200 — and press Alt+; (Go To Special > Visible cells only) so the hidden rows drop out of the selection.
4. Type Cleared and press Ctrl+Enter to write it into every selected cell at once.
5. Clear the filter, then clear the marker fill and the strikethrough from the original column.

That is a year of paint converted into data in about a minute, and the status column is now something COUNTIFS can count, AutoFilter can isolate and a CSV can carry.

Be honest about what you have and have not recovered. You have recovered the fact that a line was marked. You have not recovered who marked it, when they marked it, or what they agreed it to, because none of that was ever in the file and no amount of cleverness gets it back. The correct entry in the "Cleared by" and "Cleared date" columns for those 137 rows is your own initials and the date you did the recovery, with a note on the sheet saying the status was reconstructed from formatting in a workbook that recorded nothing else. Filling in the original preparer's initials because you are fairly sure it was them is inventing evidence, which is a considerably worse problem than the one you started with.

The same Format button appears in Replace, so once the status is captured you can find strikethrough-formatted cells and swap their formatting for something else in bulk.

Layer two: the status column, the sign-off, and the rule that reads both

Microsoft 365 added real in-cell checkboxes in 2024. They are not the old floating Form Control objects — the checkbox lives in the cell, and the cell's value is genuinely TRUE or FALSE, which means formulas can count it, SUMIF can filter on it, and conditional formatting can read it.

Step 1 — add the checkbox column

Select the range that should hold them, say E2:E200, then Insert tab > Checkbox (Controls group). Every cell in the range gets a tickable box. Click one, or select it and press Space, to toggle. Empty cells now read FALSE; ticked cells read TRUE.

Step 2 — record who and when

A tick on its own is half a record: it says the item cleared, and nothing about who decided that or when. Add two columns beside it.

• F, "Cleared by" — two or three initials, picked from a Data > Data Validation > List drop-down of the people who work on the file (how to build one). A drop-down rather than free text, because SK, S.K. and Sara are three different values to COUNTIFS and one person to everybody else.
• G, "Cleared date" — typed with Ctrl+;, which enters the current date as a fixed value in the cell.

Use Ctrl+; and specifically not =IF($E2,TODAY(),""). TODAY() is volatile: it re-evaluates every time the workbook recalculates, which includes every time it is opened. The formula version therefore rewrites itself to whatever today happens to be for whoever opened the file, so six weeks after the close every line you cleared on the 3rd claims to have been cleared this morning. The one thing the column exists to evidence is the one thing the formula destroys. If you want the convenience without the volatility, type the date once at the top of the sheet and copy it down the rows you clear in that sitting.

Step 3 — the rule that strikes the row

1. Select the range you want crossed out — the whole row of data, e.g. A2:D200. Start the selection at A2, the top-left cell of the range: relative references in the rule are written from that anchor. Stop the range before the evidence columns, so the tick, the initials and the date stay legible rather than being crossed out themselves.
2. Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule > Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
3. Enter =$E2 — the checkbox column, with the column locked and the row not locked.
4. Click Format > Font tab, tick Strikethrough, set the colour to grey, OK, OK.

Tick a box and the entire row goes grey and crossed out. Untick it and the row comes back. Two notes on the formula. =$E2 is shorthand for =$E2=TRUE; both work. And the mixed anchoring is the whole trick — the $ on the column makes every cell in the row look at column E, while the free row number lets the rule walk down the range. =$E$2 strikes everything or nothing; =E2 makes each column check itself and produces nonsense.

The Format dialog inside conditional formatting is deliberately reduced — font name and size are greyed out — but font style, colour, underline and strikethrough are all available, which is all we need.

Step 4 — make the rule read the sign-off too

The rule as written strikes a row the moment the box is ticked, which is one column short of what you want. Edit it — Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules, select the rule, Edit Rule — and change the formula to:

=AND($E2,$F2<>"",$G2<>"")

Now the line is drawn only when the item is ticked and initialled and dated. Each reference keeps the same mixed anchoring as before — column locked, row free — for the same reason. The practical effect is that a half-finished row looks half-finished: somebody who ticked forty boxes at five to five and initialled none of them is looking at forty rows that have not crossed themselves off, and so is the reviewer. The mark stops being decoration and becomes a statement that a named person finished the work on a stated date.

If your sheet uses a text status rather than checkboxes, the same rule reads =AND($E2="Cleared",$F2<>"",$G2<>"").

If you do not have Insert > Checkbox

Older builds and, as of 2026, the perpetual-licence versions have no in-cell checkbox — check Insert on your own build before assuming either way. Use a text status column instead — a two-item drop-down of Done and blank via Data > Data Validation > List (how to build one) — and change the rule formula to =$E2="Done". Everything else is identical, and the text version has one advantage: it survives being saved as CSV or opened by someone on an older Excel.

Build the range as a proper Table (Ctrl+T) and both the drop-down and the conditional formatting extend themselves to new rows automatically, which matters when next month's statement is longer than this month's.

Worked example 1: a bank reconciliation a reviewer can sample

A reconciliation sheet with dates in A, description in B, reference in C, amount in D, a checkbox in E headed "Cleared", and the two sign-off columns from Step 2 in F and G:

With the rule from the previous section applied to A2:D200, signed-off lines cross themselves off as you work down the statement, and row 3 stays plain because nobody has cleared it. The value of doing it this way rather than with Ctrl+5 is the formulas it makes possible — first the two the preparer needs:

Items still outstanding:   =COUNTIFS($A$2:$A$200,"<>",$E$2:$E$200,FALSE)
Value still outstanding:   =SUM($D$2:$D$200)-SUMIF($E$2:$E$200,TRUE,$D$2:$D$200)

The count is a COUNTIFS rather than a plain =COUNTIF($E$2:$E$200,FALSE) for a reason worth understanding. If you dropped checkboxes across the whole of E2:E200 but this month's statement only runs to forty lines, every one of the 160 empty rows also reads FALSE, and the plain version cheerfully reports 160 outstanding items that do not exist. Adding the test $A$2:$A$200,"<>" — column A is not blank — restricts the count to rows that actually carry a transaction.

The value formula is written as a subtraction on the same principle. =SUMIF($E$2:$E$200,FALSE,$D$2:$D$200) looks equivalent and is more fragile: it picks up only rows whose cell is literally FALSE, so a line whose checkbox was deleted rather than unticked — leaving a genuinely blank cell beside a live amount — quietly drops out of the outstanding figure. Totalling everything and deducting what is ticked cannot drift that way.

That outstanding figure is the number that has to agree to your reconciling items — the full layout, including the statement-balance-to-book-balance bridge, is in the bank reconciliation template post.

Then three more, which exist only because columns F and G are there. Put the close cut-off date in H1, a materiality figure in H2, and a short list of preparer initials down J2:J5:

Cleared by each preparer:  =COUNTIFS($E$2:$E$200,TRUE,$F$2:$F$200,$J2)
Cleared after the cut-off: =COUNTIFS($E$2:$E$200,TRUE,$G$2:$G$200,">"&$H$1)
Reviewer's sample:         =FILTER($A$2:$G$200,($E$2:$E$200)*(ABS($D$2:$D$200)>$H$2),"None over threshold")

The first splits the work by who did it, which is what a manager wants before signing a schedule prepared by three people. The second is the one worth building first: it counts items cleared after the cut-off you reported to, and a non-zero answer means part of the pack was finished after the numbers went out. The third returns the actual rows a reviewer should test — every cleared item above the materiality figure — as a live range she can read without touching the working sheet. FILTER needs Microsoft 365 or Excel 2021 and later; on an older build, AutoFilter the same two conditions by hand and copy the visible rows.

Note what none of these could be written against: a column of crossed-out cells. Every one of them reads a value, and the reason the reviewer can sample the work at all is that the preparer wrote the work down rather than painting it.

Worked example 2: the close checklist, with a sign-off per task

Same mechanism, different sheet. Task in A, owner in B, due day in C, notes in D, a "Complete" checkbox in E. Apply the rule to A2:D40 rather than A2:E40 so the checkbox column itself is not struck through — a crossed-out tick box looks broken.

Add a progress cell at the top:

=COUNTIF($E$2:$E$40,TRUE)/COUNTA($A$2:$A$40)

Format it as a percentage and add Home > Conditional Formatting > Data Bars for a progress bar that fills as the close proceeds. Freeze the header row so that figure stays visible while you scroll (how to lock rows), and the sheet answers "where are we?" without anyone opening a chat window. The 20-task version, with owners and due days laid out, is in the month-end close checklist post.

Then give the checklist the same two evidence columns as the reconciliation: F, "Done by" as an initials drop-down, and G, "Completed", typed with Ctrl+;. On a close checklist the owner in column B is who the task was assigned to, which is not the same fact as who actually did it at half past nine on day three, and it is the second one a reviewer asks about.

Once they exist, count the signed-off tasks rather than the ticked ones:

=COUNTIFS($E$2:$E$40,TRUE,$F$2:$F$40,"<>",$G$2:$G$40,"<>")/COUNTA($A$2:$A$40)

The difference between this figure and the plain version is the amount of the close that has been ticked but not owned. On the morning of day four that gap is the most useful number on the sheet, because it is the list of tasks somebody believes are finished and nobody has put their name to.

What survives when you send the file out

A workbook rarely stays where it was built. Before you rely on a mark, know what reaches the other end:

The practical rule: when the pack goes to an auditor, a client, or a colleague on a different Excel version, the status and sign-off columns are the deliverable and the strikethrough is decoration that may or may not arrive. Build the columns first and let the paint follow them.

How HISAB 360 helps

Ticking boxes is fine for forty close tasks. It is a poor use of a qualified person's afternoon for four hundred bank lines, where the real work is not the ticking but the matching that precedes it.

HISAB 360 is a paid Excel add-in with an AI chat panel docked inside the workbook, and its bank reconciliation automation does that matching: it compares a statement sheet against your ledger, matches on amount, date proximity and reference, and proposes the lines that clear — leaving you the genuine exceptions rather than the whole list. It handles fuzzy matching where descriptions differ between bank and ledger ("MARLOW LTD 0803" against "Marlow Limited"), and it can extract the statement itself from a PDF into a table when your bank gives you nothing better.

The ledger side can come straight from your accounting system rather than an export: it connects to QuickBooks Online, Xero, Zoho Books, Odoo and FreshBooks, pulling invoices, bills and GL activity into sheets, and writing entries back. The same chat panel will build the two-layer setup above if you describe it in plain English — the =AND($E2,$F2<>"",$G2<>"") rule with the mixed references most people get wrong on the first attempt, and the data validation list of preparer initials sitting behind the sign-off column.

What it does not do is sign anything off. A line the add-in proposes as matched is a proposal; putting initials and a date against it is a human act, and it is precisely the act the reviewer is testing. The tool gets you to the decision faster and leaves the decision where it belongs.

Honest limits: it is Windows desktop Excel only (Microsoft 365 or Excel 2016+ on 64-bit Windows), not Mac and not Excel on the web, and it is paid, with a 15-day trial that includes 50 AI credits and needs no card. Automated matches deserve the same spot-check you would give a junior's.

Every method on one page

Knowing that formatting is decoration and status is data — and putting each in its right place — is one of the habits that separates a tidy workbook from a fragile one; the rest of that list is in Excel skills for accountants.

Frequently asked questions

Try HISAB 360 on your own workbook

HISAB 360 is an AI assistant inside Excel for accountants and finance teams — it writes macros, Power Query and formulas from plain English, and connects two-way to QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Odoo and FreshBooks. The 15-day trial is the full product, no card required.