Saturday, December 3, 2011

How to shade alternate rows in Excel for easy reading

If your job entitles poring over boring Excel sheets, and you are straining your eyes to identify information in such sheets, here is a nice and useful technology tip to shade alternate rows in Excel

Shading alternate rows in Excel can be extremely useful for identifying numbers or text quickly. For doing this, you can take advantage of a featured called 'Conditional Formatting' in Microsoft Excel.

This feature is extremely useful when we have Microsoft Excel sheets running into huge number of rows and columns. Identifying information or data in this maze of rows and columns is extremely difficult.

Just follow the steps below for doing this:

1. Highlight the range of cells that you want to format
2. Choose Format from the pull-down menu
3. Select Conditional Formatting to display the Conditional Formatting dialog box
4. Select Formula Is from the first drop-down list box, and enter =MOD(ROW(),2)=0 in the second box
5. Click the Format button to bring up the Format Cells dialog box
6. Select the Patterns tab and specify a color for the shaded rows. Choose a light color so the black text will still be legible
7. Click OK twice to return to your worksheet

You will find that you have successfully managed to paint alternate rows in different colors - allowing information to be easily identifiable.