Open Office spreadsheet question

I don't know much about using spread sheets but I am working on documenting a build of materials for one of my projects.
 
Is there a way to automatically assign background colors to alternating rows? Is there a way to make it "stick' to line numbers so that inserting a row at some later date doesn't require having to manually fix the alternating a pattern?
 
Thank you.
 
 

Thanks Larry,
 That's a good head start... in terms of knowing that what I hope to do is possible.
 
 I don't know a thing about writing macros and stuff... but now I know where to start looking.
 
 Thank you. 

Good Job Mike!

You can solve world hunger in Excel if you're patient? I've done "much" VB programming in Excel. You can make it do whatever you want it to do. If you're just trying to do highlighting every other row? You should do a few roze manually and then format paint the rest.