Shading cells in spreadsheet programs

[crashwg]

Ok, so I've been looking for this for some time now and I've had no luck so I'm resorting to the "ask the experts" forum aka "everything else".

In M$ Excell or in OpenOffice.org's Calc, I am assuming there must be a way to shade every-other cell wheter it be evens or odds in order to make following a line accross the page easy to do without the use of a straight edge.

So far what I've figgured out is in Excell if you shade one line and leave the next normal then select the two and drag-fill this thing will pop up and you can select "fill format" or something to that effect.  Although this does work, I am still of the belief that there must be an easier way.

P.S. the help features on both programs are as useless as any other when it comes to searching when you don't know the terminology of these things which I believe is the case.

[Hoopz]

Try this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268568/