That's not really elegant, but will sometimes do the job. To get into really fancy tables, you have to use HTML markup.
<pre>
<table border=1>
<tr><td>One Cell</td><td>Another cell</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan=2>Big 2-column cell</td></tr>
</table>
</pre>
gives you:
<table border=1>
<tr><td>One Cell</td><td>Another cell</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan=2>Big 2-column cell</td></tr>
</table>
I looked at some methods for simplifying table markup in the wiki manner, but they all came out almost as complicated as the basic HTML, without the flexibility. If you really want to use tables for layout instead of the sophisticated, simple, modern CSS methods, you need to learn how to do it in HTML.