There's a quiet frustration hiding in this question, and it's one we recognize immediately. The user doesn't want to disable page break lines permanently. They want them gone for now, without losing the ability to bring them back on their own terms. That's not a technical limitation. It's a design choice that prioritizes permanence over flexibility, and it makes everyday work feel heavier than it needs to be.
The core issue is that Excel treats page break lines as an all-or-nothing proposition. You either live with the grey dashes cluttering your view or you dig into Options and turn the feature off entirely, which means you'll need to remember how to re-enable it later. Neither option respects the way people actually work. Most of us don't plan to accidentally click Page Break Preview. We're moving fast, we're focused on the task at hand, and suddenly our screen is full of visual noise that has nothing to do with the data in front of us. The solution should be just as quick and reversible as the mistake.
What makes this particularly telling is that the user searched for a workaround and found only instructions for permanent changes. That's a signal that the software's logic is built around settings, not context. But spreadsheets are living documents. They shift, evolve, and get revisited. A temporary view should be just that, temporary. If you can accidentally enter Page Break Preview with a single click, you should be able to exit it just as easily without losing the underlying page break awareness. The fact that you can't suggests a gap between what the feature is meant to do and how it actually behaves in practice.
The practical takeaway here is simple: the next time you find yourself stuck with grey dashed lines and no obvious way to dismiss them, you don't have to settle for a permanent fix. You can navigate to the View tab, switch back to Normal, and then adjust your display settings to hide the page breaks without disabling them globally. It's not the most intuitive path, and that's exactly the problem. But knowing that the option exists, even if it's buried, means you can reclaim your workspace without losing the safety net of seeing where one page ends and the next begins. The fix should be faster than the accident that caused it. Right now, it isn't, and that's worth saying out loud.