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

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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.
2. 
3. Choose Conditional Formatting from the Format menu.
4. 
5. Change the drop down box to “Formula Is”.
6. 
7. Enter “=MOD(ROW(),2)” in the formula box.
8. 
9. Select the formatting by pressing on the format button.
10. Click OK.

And you now have highlighted rows.