As you found out, conditional formatted fill colors take priority over standard cell fill colors.
Also, conditionally formatted borders can produce unexpected results as the border
color displayed can vary with the border thickness and with which cell owns the border.

As an alternative to CF of alternate rows, you might want to try the free
Excel add-in "Shade Data Rows" to do the shading.
You can shade by cell value, every nth row or in row groups using any color.
Download from ... http://www.realezsites.com/bus/primitivesoftware
--
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA

"tjsmags"
wrote in message
I use the following conditional formatting formula =MOD(ROW(),2)+1<=1 to
alternate colors for my spreadsheet. Whenever I insert a row it will
automatically adjust the rows to be alternating colors. But, I cell shade
(using light grey) some of the cells in this spreadsheet. Some of these
greyed cells are on the WHITE rows and some are on the LIGHT BLUE rows
(relating to the conditional formatting formula). I cannot see the greyed
out cells when they're on the light blue rows (it doesn't show up). How can
I fix this?