在前导列中合并行与行的交替颜色-Excel 2016

Question

I'm trying to create an Excel sheet that will be tracking some of our autonomous processes and their access privileges at my company and I've run into an issue with Excel..

I'm trying to alternate row colors, which in and of itself isn't an issue, however the fact that I've got merged rows are giving me issues.

As of right now I've got 5 columns with headers in A through E. Column F is being used for conditional formatting to color the rows. In column F this formula is present:

=MOD(IF(ROW()=2,0,IF(A2=A1,F1, F1+1)), 2)

This works great if I want to repeat the leading Column item over and over, however I'd like to reduce the visual clutter and increase clarity, so I've merged some of the rows in the Column A because multiple rows in B:E correspond to it.

I've merged A2:A4 right now and the formula picks up the A2 and A4 as blank, but A3 (the text in the merged cell is centered) is recognized as different that A2 and A4 because the text resides there. I'll upload an image to give a better idea of what I'm talking about as well.

If anyone can give me a tip on how to alternate row colors with merged cells/rows that'd be great, I've done a lot of googling and searching on stackoverflow, but for the most part I've only found things that pertain to unmerged rows/cells.

Image Example: https://imgur.com/a/UDbRVWA

=IF() Condition that worked for me:

=MOD(IF(ROW()=2,0,IF((A2=0),IF((OR(A1<>0,A2=A1)),F1, F1+1),F1+1)), 2)

There is an answer below with a picture I posted, however, for most situations I would recommend the method suggested by @BruceWayne. It's far more sensible than working with merged cells!

Answer 1

Might I make a suggestion? If the merging rows is to increase clarity with repeated entries, perhaps we can use another Conditional Formatting rule to make it more legible.

Say you have data that looks like this:

But, we don't want to see <Process #> duplicates in the A column. We could merge these cells and center it along the rows. But again, merging cells is generally frowned upon I've found. (It makes it tricky to format, conditional format, copy/paste, do any VLOOKUP() / Index/Match , etc.)

First, let's get the rows alternating colors. I'm using fill of RGB(183, 255, 253):

New Rule 1 -
Formula: =MOD(ROW(),2)
Applies To Range: $A$2:$E$9
Format: Fill with color RGB 183, 255, 253 (...or whatever you want, just note the RGB for later)

Now, we get this:

Okay, making progress. Now, let's work on hiding the duplicate values in column A.

So, let's apply some more Conditional Formats. We'll need two for column A, one to set the font to White, one to set the Font to that blue fill color.

New Rule 2 -
Formula: =AND($A3=$A2,MOD(ROW(),2)=1)
Applies To: =$A$3:$A$100
Format: Font --> Color --> RGB(183, 255, 253)

New Rule 3 -
Formula: =AND($A3=$A2,MOD(ROW(),2)=0)
Applies To: =$A$3:$A$100
Format: Font --> Color --> White

Now we have:

IMO, we can do one more thing to clarify the breaks in Processes:

New Rule 4 -
Formula: =$A2<>$A1
Applies To: =$A$2:$E$100
Format: Border --> Top Border

Now, we have a nice new CF table.

Answer 2

I ended up finding a solution with just some clever working with the Conditional IF() statements. I think the key was taking into account that the Merged Cells that weren't the top (ie If I merged A2:A4, A2 is top, A3, A4 bottom) were equal to 0 while the top was set to the value of the text within the merged cell. Using the formula below I was able to achieve the result I was after:

=MOD(IF(ROW()=2,0,IF((A2=0),IF((OR(A1<>0,A2=A1)),F1, F1+1),F1+1)), 2)

And here is a linked screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/gNaC62c

I then just added conditional formatting for every row but row 1: =$F2=1 . I'll be hiding column F to make it seem less obtrusive.

For future reference, I would agree with what @BruceWayne mentioned in that a simpler formatting that gets the job done would be preferable. There are many other ways to format this in a way that makes much more sense, but I felt like I was close when I was tinkering with it, so I stuck with it another 15 minutes or so and was able to pull out a usable formatting condition.