Sometimes it improves the legibility of spreadsheets to have alternating row or column colors. Doing this manually (holding ctrl + left-clicking, then changing the background fill color of the selected cells) can be tedious and cumbersome. So, while the manual method suffices for short spans of cells, something more automated is preferred for entire documents, worksheets, or a copious number of rows or columns.

There are actually a few ways to do this in OpenOffice.org Calc (version 3.2 shown below), but the easiest method is to use Conditional Formatting. That’s the method I’ll show you below.

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