Sickles Insight

Have you ever wished you could highlight every other row in Excel without the hassle of highlighting and filling the color in manually. Well - if you’ve done it that way in the past, there’s a really simple trick to get it done for you automatically.

Sometimes it’s easier to read long rows of information if you highlight with a dull gray every other line. This allows the reader to more easily follow the information across the page both on screen and in print. Anyway, there is a simple way to do this in Excel with the use of a built in feature called conditional formatting.

You can use this these steps to provide any formatting you wish to every other row. The most common use for this is to highlight the background of every other row for easier reading, but you could change virtually any property of the cell. I will walk you through the easy steps of this process.

You can choose to write the data first or highlight the rows first, I suggest highlighting after filling in the information on the spreadsheet.

1. Highlight the entire first row you wish to apply the formatting to.
2. Click on Format > Conditional Formatting
3. Choose ‘Formula Is’ in the first box
4. In the second box, place this line: =MOD(ROW(),2)=0 (don’t forget to include the equals sign in the front)
5. Click Format and apply the changes you would like to make to every other row (color, font, etc)
6. Select OK when done
7. Select OK again to get back to your spreadsheet
8. Nothing has changed, but this is okay. Your entire row should still be highlighted. Place your mouse cursor at the far right side of the highlighted area to which you just applied these settings. (the cursor should change from a white large plus sign to a smaler black plus sign)
9. RIGHT click and drag downward over all rows you wish to highlight alternating.
10. Release the mouse button and choose ‘Fill Formatting Only’

You should now have a page of formatting on alternating rows. Thanks for reading!

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