Excel tip

[Tom_T]

Everyone is knee-deep in spreadsheets these days. They're sometimes easier to read when every other line is shaded. It's very easy to do this in Excel. I don't know if the latest version has a one-click way to do this, but you can use this technique with almost any version. I am still using Excel 2000.

1. Highlight the range of rows you wish to format.
2. On the Format menu, click Conditional Formatting.
3. Under Condition 1, select Formula Is.
4. In the data entry box, type =MOD(ROW(),2)=1
5. Click the Format button. In the Format Cells dialog box, click the Patterns tab.
6. Select a color to use for shading, and then click OK.

If you have several different sections of your spreadsheet that need to be formatted individually, all you need to do is to immediately highlight the next range and hit F4 to repeat the last operation (the conditional format.)

(The above steps were taken from the Microsoft Help site.)

[NICK@HQ]

Very nice tip! I will implement that forthwith.

[Steve NY]

Tom, that's a great help....thanks for posting.

[JonE]

This works in Excel 2003, too. Highlight the whole row, though, not just the first cell in the row.

In Excel 2007, it is comically easy to do this; click the Layout tab and follow the pictures.