How to Strikethrough Text in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Google's own apps hide their strikethrough controls in different places depending on which app you're in, so it's easy to end up hunting through menus mid-document. This guide covers the exact shortcut and menu path for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides on Windows, Mac, and mobile, plus a few things about how strikethrough behaves in Google's apps that aren't obvious until you run into them.
Google Docs: Keyboard Shortcut and Menu
The fastest way to strikethrough text in Google Docs is to select it and press Alt+Shift+5 on Windows and ChromeOS, or Cmd+Shift+X on Mac. If you'd rather not memorize a shortcut, select your text, open Format in the menu bar, choose Text, then click Strikethrough. Both methods apply real formatting, the same kind you'd get from a strikethrough button in Microsoft Word, so it's a proper document style rather than a workaround. It also toggles off the same way: select the struck-through text and use the same shortcut or menu item again to remove it. Strikethrough combines cleanly with bold, italic, and underline in Docs, so you can mark a heading as both bold and crossed out at once if you need to.
Google Sheets: Strikethrough in Cells
Sheets doesn't share Docs' menu layout, but it does share the shortcut: select a cell or a range and press Alt+Shift+5 on Windows or Cmd+Shift+X on Mac. You can also select the cells, open Format in the menu bar, and choose Strikethrough directly. This only changes how the text displays; it doesn't affect the underlying cell value, so formulas that reference a struck-through cell keep working normally. A useful trick for task trackers: pair a checkbox column (Insert → Checkbox) with a conditional formatting rule set to "Custom formula is" checking whether the adjacent checkbox is TRUE, with strikethrough as the formatting style. Checking the box then automatically crosses out the row's text without you touching the strikethrough shortcut at all.
Google Slides: No Default Shortcut
Slides is the odd one out: it doesn't have a built-in keyboard shortcut for strikethrough in most current versions. Instead, click into a text box, select your text, open Format, choose Text, then Strikethrough. If you build slides often and want to skip the menu, you can also paste in text from the Strikethrough Text Generator — it's plain Unicode text, so it drops directly into a text box with the line already applied, and you can combine it with bold or italic styling from the same tool before pasting.
Mobile: Android and iOS
In the Google Docs and Sheets mobile apps, select your text, tap the formatting icon (it looks like an "A" with small lines under it), and choose Strikethrough from the row of text style options that appears. Slides on mobile follows the same pattern inside its own text formatting panel, though the icon layout shifts slightly between Android and iOS versions. If the option seems to be missing on your device, update the app first — older builds sometimes tuck formatting controls behind a smaller icon that's easy to miss on a phone-sized screen.
Strikethrough in Suggesting Mode
There's a second, unrelated way strikethrough shows up in Docs: when you're in Suggesting mode (the pencil icon next to Editing, top right) and you delete text, Docs doesn't remove it outright — it displays the deleted text with a strikethrough line and colored formatting to show it as a pending suggestion, alongside any newly inserted text in a different color. This is Docs' version of tracked changes, and it's a completely separate mechanism from manually applying strikethrough formatting yourself. If you see strikethrough text you didn't add, check whether the document is in Suggesting mode before assuming someone applied the format on purpose.
When the Shortcut Doesn't Work
If Alt+Shift+5 does nothing, the most common cause is a browser extension or an operating system shortcut intercepting the key combination before Docs ever sees it — this happens fairly often on ChromeOS and with window-management tools on Windows. Try the Format menu instead to confirm the feature itself is working, then check your browser extensions if the keyboard shortcut specifically is the problem. On some Chromebook models, Alt+Shift+5 also triggers a partial screen capture shortcut at the system level, which can conflict directly with the Docs shortcut. If none of that explains it, try the same text in an incognito window with extensions disabled — that isolates whether an extension is the cause in under a minute.
Removing Strikethrough You Didn't Add
Pasting content from a website, PDF, or another document sometimes brings unwanted strikethrough formatting along with it, since Docs tries to preserve the source's styling by default. Select the affected text and press Ctrl+\ on Windows or Cmd+\ on Mac to clear all character formatting at once, including strikethrough, bold, italic, and font color, back to the document's default text style. If you only want to remove the strikethrough and keep everything else, select the text and use the same Alt+Shift+5 shortcut again — since it's a toggle, applying it to already-struck-through text turns it off without touching bold, italic, or color.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a strikethrough shortcut for Google Slides?+
Not by default in most current versions — use Format → Text → Strikethrough, or paste in pre-styled text from the Strikethrough Text Generator if you want to skip the menu entirely.
Does Google Docs strikethrough carry over to Word or PDF exports?+
Yes. Because it's real document formatting rather than special characters, it survives exporting to .docx, PDF, and the other formats Docs supports.
Can I strikethrough just part of a word in Sheets?+
Yes — you can select individual characters within a cell's text, not just the whole cell, and apply strikethrough to only that portion.
Why does my deleted text show up crossed out instead of disappearing?+
The document is probably in Suggesting mode rather than Editing mode. Deletions there are shown as strikethrough suggestions rather than removed outright, so another editor can accept or reject the change.
Is the strikethrough shortcut the same across all three apps?+
Docs and Sheets share the same shortcut (Alt+Shift+5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+X on Mac). Slides is the exception and has no default shortcut in most current versions, so you'll need the Format menu there instead.
Will strikethrough formatting break a shared spreadsheet's formulas?+
No. Strikethrough is purely visual formatting applied to how a cell displays, so it has no effect on the cell's underlying value, and any formula referencing that cell continues to calculate normally.
Can I apply strikethrough to an entire column at once in Sheets?+
Yes — click the column header to select the whole column, then use the same shortcut or Format menu path. It applies to every cell in the column, including ones you fill in later, as long as the formatting was set on the full column rather than just the currently filled cells.
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