If you Google “making every other row a different color” in Excel, you’ll get the advice from Microsoft to first “Format as table.” Unfortunately, formatting a range of cells as a table may come with other consequences that you don’t want.
You can do it more simply by using Excel’s “conditional formatting” feature. There’s an excellent article on a site called “Excel Easy” that describes how to do this step-by-step: “Shade Alternate Rows.“
But if you don’t want to do it yourself, grab this goody: Friday Goody Bag created a file with stripes built in. You can download it here with one click: Stripes Template for Excel.
In the “Stripes” file, the very last worksheet also has some handy drop-down buttons. Check it out!