Strikethrough in Excel: The Ctrl+5 Shortcut and Auto-Cross-Off for Cleared Items

How-to · Updated July 2026 · ~14 min read

Ctrl+5. Select the cells, press it, and the text is crossed out. Press it again and the line comes off. That is the whole answer to the question most people arrive with, and on a Mac it is Cmd+Shift+X.

The rest of this post is for when that is not enough: when the shortcut does nothing, when the line has to cross only three characters inside a cell, when the strikethrough refuses to come off, and — the part worth staying for — when you want a row to cross itself off. Nobody ticking off cleared bank items or completed close tasks wants to select a row and press Ctrl+5 four hundred times. You want a checkbox and a conditional formatting rule that strikes the row the moment the box is ticked, and that takes about ninety seconds to build.

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.

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.

There is no strikethrough button on the ribbon — put one there

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 use strikethrough daily, 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.

A third option scales better across a team: a named cell style. Home > Cell Styles > New Cell Style, name it "Cancelled", click Format, set the Font tab to Strikethrough plus grey, OK. Anyone in the workbook applies the same look in one click, one edit to the definition updates every tagged cell, and clearing it means applying the Normal style.

Striking through part of a cell

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" but not the invoice number in a notes cell. Three 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; and it disappears in CSV, which carries no formatting at all.

Removing strikethrough — four causes, four fixes

"It won't come off" is the second most common strikethrough question, and the fix depends entirely on how the line got there.

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.

Finding every struck-through cell

Excel can search by format, which is how you audit a sheet somebody else crossed up:

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; click any result to jump to it, or press Ctrl+A inside the results list to select them all at once — at which point Ctrl+5 clears the lot. The same Format button appears in Replace, so you can find strikethrough-formatted cells and replace their formatting with something else in bulk.

The thing to understand before you build on it: formatting is not data

Strikethrough is paint. It changes nothing about the value underneath, and this catches people out in three 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.

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 next section builds.

The modern way: a checkbox that crosses the row off itself

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 — the rule that strikes the row

1. Select the range you want crossed out — the whole row of data, e.g. A2:E200. Start the selection at A2, the top-left cell of the range: relative references in the rule are written from that anchor.
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.

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: crossing off cleared bank transactions

A reconciliation sheet with dates in A, description in B, reference in C, amount in D and a checkbox in E, headed "Cleared":

With the rule from the previous section applied to A2:E200, ticked lines cross themselves off as you work down the statement. The value of doing it this way rather than with Ctrl+5 is the two formulas it makes possible:

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.

Worked example 2: the month-end close checklist

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.

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 marks 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, FreshBooks and Sage Accounting, pulling invoices, bills and GL activity into sheets, and writing entries back. The same chat panel will build the conditional formatting rule described above if you ask for it in plain English — "cross out and grey any row where the Cleared box is ticked" — including the mixed-reference detail that most people get wrong on the first attempt.

Honest limits: it is Windows desktop Excel only (Microsoft 365 or 2016+, 64-bit), 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, FreshBooks and Sage. The 15-day trial is the full product, no card required.