Abstract: High silicon steel with an initial near columnar-grained structure was directly hot-rolled and followed by subsequent warm-rolling,cold-rolling and annealing. Then its microstructure and texture were determined using electron backscatter diffraction,and the magnetic properties of annealed sheets were measured as well. For this high silicon steel,the microstructure and texture evolution of initial near columnar-grained samples represent competitive behavior between fine shear-textured grains near the surface of sheets and coarse grains in the center layer of sheets,which are consisted of α-fiber grains or deformed original cube oriented grains.There are obvious effects of initial columnar grains in the whole process,and a small amount of cube-oriented regions are retained in final annealed sheets,thus the 111-fiber texture finally decreases. Furthermore,it is noticed that coarse recrystallized grains are generally related to original cube oriented grains and they are beneficial to the magnetic properties of final annealed sheets. The magnetic properties of annealed sheets in this study are lower than those reported in literature in final sheets with sharp 120 〈001〉 or 001 〈120〉texture,while they are better than non-oriented high silicon steel. In addition,the difference of magnetic induction between the rolling direction and transverse direction of annealed sheets is small,thus the initial columnar-grained structure is potential to be used in making non-oriented high silicon steel.