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.
 
 

I don't know about Open Office, but you could write
a formatting Macro that would do it all for you.  That
way, if you added lines, you could just run the macro 
to reformat the spreadsheet, rather then have to fix
it (or them) manually.

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. 

I found a tutorial and stumbled through it:
 
http://www.computercorrect.com/2010/desktop-applications/openoffice-org/alternating-colors-calc/
 

Good Job Mike!

I vote this the most efficient self-fulfilling fred of 2014.

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.