11/1/19 for time wizards

Adding stripes to your Excel sheet – and a template that does it for you

If you Google 'making every other row a different color' in Excel, you’ll get the advice from Microsoft to first format it as a table. Unfortunately, formatting a range of cells as a table may come with other consequences that you don’t want.

Cartoon: Excel document and stripes

You can do it more simply by using Excel’s “conditional formatting” feature and using a formula to color the rows.

I can never remember the formula, so I created a file with stripes built in. You can download it here: Stripes Template for Excel.

In the “Stripes” file, the very last worksheet also has some handy drop-down buttons. Check it out!

Download the Striped spreadsheet template (.xlsx, 52kb)