Use Conditional Formatting to shade alternate rows in Excel

If you are working with large tables of data in Excel, you can make your spreadsheet easier to read by formatting alternate rows to be shaded a different colour. There are a number of ways you can achieve this. This lesson shows you a quick and easy way to do it on Excel 2011 for Mac.

 Configure alternate row shading in Excel 2011 for Mac

This method uses the conditional formatting option in Excel that allows you to set the format of a cell or range of cells based on the outcome of a formula. The way it works is to check to see if the current row number is an even number, and then format the even numbered rows with a formatting colour/shading of your choice. It is a bit convoluted, but works well once you follow these steps.

• Select the range of cells you want to format with alternat row shading.
  
• Click the Conditional Formatting button on the Home menu
  
• Then, click the option you want from the drop down list. In our case, we are skipping the presets (the first five options) and setting up a New Rule.
  
  • Note that you can also choose Conditional Formatting from the Format menu.
• The New Formatting Rule dialog box will then be displayed as follows. The dialog box defaults to 2-color Scale. In our case, we need the Classic option from the list shown in the screenshot below:
  
• Once you have chosen the Classic formatting rule style, the New Formatting Rule dialog will change to show you the related options:
  
• Next, change the formatting option from the default of Format only cells that contain to Use a formula to determine which cells to format, which is the last option shown in the dialog box below:
  
• Finally, configure the options to look like the following screenshot.
  
• You should have entered the formula as shown, and then selected a formatting option from the Format With dropdown box.
  • The formula shown, =MOD(ROW(),2)=0 checks to see if a row is an even numbered row
  • The Format With option lets you choose from several pre-set formatting rules (we'll choose green fill with dark green text for our example) or to choose a custom format.
• Once you've finished configuring the conditional rule as shown above, click OK to save the new rule. The Manage Rules dialog will appear:
  
• As you can see, this rule will be applied to the range selected. Click OK once more to see how the selected cells look once the rule is applied:
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• If you want to modify the rulem, you can get back to the Manage Rules dialog box by choosing Conditional Formatting from the Formatting menu.