Here's one thing that worked for me.  Click on the "Color" shelf and change the Transparency to anything less than 90%, and the background turns to the plain white magically.  90% or greater, and it goes back to a grey background.

Very strange.

Is this happening on all your workbooks?  I'd definitely contact Support@tableausoftware.com as it does seem very bug-ish.

Also, after doing the "transparency trick", row banding seems to work as expected:

Julianna, the workbook you posted looks like a corrupted workbook to me. I'd send it to support like Matthew suggested.

--Shawn

I've never seen that behavior before, so I can't say if it's corrupted or not. It might be some sort of 'expected' behavior that has to do with default formatting. But it is strange that you can't change the color to anything else, which is why I'm suggesting you send it in, or maybe Tracy Rodgers will see this and take a look.

--Shawn

Definitely appears to be a bug, and one others are experiencing as well--this issue is related, and changing the transparency to less than 90% fixes this one as well:

Re: Re: light gray "highlighting" on text and shapes

Did that work?

--Shawn

Another option here is to remove or disable the custom background image under Map->Background Images. Using the example you posted, when I uncheck the box next to the image name ("Capture"), the problem goes away. Don't ask me why this works, but it does.

However, if you have to have that custom background in there you have 2 other options:

1) change the transparency as Matthew said above.

2) change the mark type to "square" then set the transparency all the way to zero.

Hi Julianna,

You can remove the formatting by simply formatting the table pane.

Right click on the table data, click format, click on the paint tub icon on the panel which appears and and change the pane shading to white!