We had them until early to mid 90s. The effect was used, to assure a good readability of great amounts of tabular data. This reason is still valid for larger printouts of rows with information. Instead of searching the flea market or asking your VBA programmer to achieve this outcome, you can reproduce it by using conditional formating. Imagine you have a table like the following one:
Okay, that is not a huge amount of information as mentioned before, but it will work for our purposes. Simply highlight the cells you want to format by clicking and dragging over their row numbers (be careful not to touch the borders, as this will change line height). Then go to the menu and select Format > Conditional Formatting
In the upcoming dialog box under Condition 1 select Fomula is and in the text field right beside the dropdown enter the formula
=MOD(ROW(),2)=0
Then click the Formula button and choose the Patterns tab. Here select a color like grey or light green from the color picker. Of course you can select any color you like, but take care of the contrast between background pattern and text color. It should look like this:
Click OK and voilà, there you have it, that old fashioned look:
What this formula does is detecting the actual row number with the table function ROW. Through the function MOD this value is divided by 2. If there is no rest, it is a an even row number which then will be colored by the format mentioned in condition 1.
If you are really retro 
you can have a two colored table sheet. Simply add another condition by clicking the Add button and this time, divide the number of rows by 1 and detect the odd row numbers, which then will have a different color applied. The formula for this second condition is
=MOD(ROW(),1)=0
as shown in the image below:
The outcome should be something like this:
Again, please take care not to use too flashy colors and take care of the contrast. I also suggest not to use more than two colors in one sheet.
This easy to apply formatting comes in very handy, if you are asked to print out a greater amount of tabular data.
Do you like it? Then feel free to comment on this thread and / or share your opinion, if this was useful for you.
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Comments
Skipping the “=0″ is correct, that works as well. But with comma, it didn’t work out.
This was because of the different language versions of MS Excel. When you use a semicolon ";" in European version of Excel, you will have to use a comma "," in english and american versions.
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