Watermark in Excel

When you’re sharing a spreadsheet, you may want to label it with a watermark. This often takes the form of a logo. Let’s learn how to add a watermark in Microsoft Excel.

How to Add a Watermark in Excel

While Excel doesn’t have a purpose-built watermark feature, they’re still quite easy to add. Imagine you’re sending out a spreadsheet, and want to mark it with your company logo. This helps prevent sharing and misuse.

Go to the Insert tab on Excel’s ribbon. On the far right side, click on the Text dropdown and choose Header & Footer. 

You’ll see three boxes across the top of the sheet. If you want the watermark in the center of your spreadsheet, double-click into the center box.

Next, on the Header & Footer tab on the ribbon, choose Picture. Browse to the logo image you want to use, select it, and click Insert.

Excel will import the image. Notice that it won’t immediately appear on your worksheet. Instead, you’ll see a string of text:

&[Picture]

This signifies that the watermark has been added in the header box.

Click into any cell in the workbook, and you can see the watermark has appeared. It will scale to the size of the image file that you used.

To resize it, go back into the header box containing the &[Picture] string. On the Header & Footer tab, choose Format Picture, and a sidebar will open up on the right side. You can quickly change the size and scale of your watermark by using the Size menu options. This helps you control the placement of the watermark on your page.

As you can see, Excel makes it easy to add watermarks. This is a quick way to boost document security and tie documents to your branding and logos.