Unfortunatly that code takes away the purpose of assigning columns a width so that the cells in the columns below have the same width I know following your code I could just add colspan width to each cell but that would be cumbersome Basically I d like it to be like this a b c d e f g h i k l m And as you can see in the code border 1 width 100 width 10 a width 30 b width 60 c border 1 width 100 width 30 d width 20 e width 50 f g h i k l m g h i k l m don t need to be assigned any width or anything they just take on the width of the leading row d e f Now using your code I would get a b c d e f g h i k l m Of course I could add the colpan width to each cell to get a b c d e f g h i k l m Which is the appearance I want But I don t want to have to add the colpan width to each cell once I already have a leading row that has that Sorry if I appear to be extremely picky