If you are looking for the correct way to change how many columns your products are displayed in “grid view” in Magento, the solution is actually quite simple. Navigate down to your catalog.xml file in your theme under the “app” side of Magento and open that file.

Then, what I did to make it simple is did a text search for the number of columns  displayed, in this particular case, the column count is 4. The actual line of code looks like this:

<action method=”setColumnCount”><count>4</count></action>

Change that line to read:

<action method=”setColumnCount”><count>2</count></action>

Save the file. Then go into your Magento Admin section under “System>Cache Management”, select “Refresh”, then click “Save Cache Settings”.

Now refresh your Magento catalog page in your browser and you should now see your products in “Grid View” appearing in 2 columns instead of 4, or whatever number you changed the catalog.xml file to.

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