What you want to use is Conditional Formatting.

For Color Banding the best place to read about it is at Chip Pearson's
basically to band even rows (leave header row alone) =MOD(ROW(),2)=0
but you will see formulas for any number of rows banded,
and which row to start banding color on at
Color Banding With Conditional Formatting
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/banding.htm

If you were using Filtering there is a different formula you can use, but
you have to have every cell in column A used of those rows that are showing
so it is not as general purpose but =MOD(SUBTOTAL(3,$A$1:$A1),2)
would band alternate rows even with filtering. . You must have activecell on A1
when entering formula.
Conditional Formatting: Color Banding
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel....htm#colorband

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HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"on-a-mission" wrote ...
i have a worksheet with data in column A, every row is either grey or
white shading. i always want to keep the shading alterante grey/white