Tips: Highlighting Every Other Row In Excel 2003…By Formula

Posted on November 7, 2008 by LJ

Fridays are tip days at SimpleProductivity blog.

I recently had a long list of information to print out as reference material. It contained several columns, and I wanted a quick way to follow the information across the printed row without having to use an external guide.

I could have used “print gridlines” to put the grid lines on, but this only marginally improve readability.

I decided to color every other row in the selection a light grey. I could have done this by hand-formatting the rows, but I had thousands of lines to do. Here is what I did to highlight the cells using conditional formatting:

Highlighting Rows With Conditional Formatting

  1. Select all the cells you wish to change.
  3. Choose Conditional Formatting from the Format menu.
  5. Change the drop down box to “Formula Is”.
  7. Enter “=MOD(ROW(),2)” in the formula box.
  9. Select the formatting by pressing on the format button.
  10. Click OK.

And you now have highlighted rows.

Related posts:

  1. Excel Templates
  2. Figuring Out What Cell is Highlighted in Excel
  3. Simplify Computer Communication Using PDF Files
  4. Creating Your Own Templates in Word
  5. Tips to Find Energy To Organize

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Comments (1)

 

  1. LJ says:
    November 7, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    One of my excellent readers, Filipe from Brazil, pointed out the formula is “=mod(lin(),2)” for those people using the Portuguese version of Excel.