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 width width a width b width c border width width d width e width 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