Need help from a LaTeX guru

[Ruffed Grouse]

Hi, Are there any \latex gurus here?

If so can you provide me with some pointers to make
the following table. As far as I can tell, it requires
multicolumns within multirows within multicolumns,
but I can't figure out how to code it.

------------------------------------
|***|***|*******|*******|
|***|***|-----------------------
|***|***|***|***|***|***|
------------------------------------
|***|***|***|***|***|***|
------------------------------------

Unfortunately, I could not make this diagram as clear as I wanted, because when I used spaces, continuous stretches of space would collapse in the preview. Here any ---- or | represent breaks between cells.

Perhaps a clearer way to describe it would be to think of the table without any merged cells as a 6 colums by 3 row table. I want to make the following merges:
column 1 row 1 with column 1 row 2
column 2 row 1 with column 2 row 2
column 3 row 1 with column 4 row 1
column 5 row 1 with column 6 row 1

Actually the table I need to make replicates this pattern a little more, but if someone can show me how to code this I'll be able to scale it up.

Thanks very much,

Michael

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[samden]

I'll presume you want all columns centered for now, I'm sure you know how to change that:

Place \usepackage{multirow} in your preamble.

\begin{tabular}{cccccc}
\multirow{2}{*}{text} & \multirow{2}{*}{text} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{text} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{text} \\
& & text & text & text & text \\
text & text & text & text & text & text \\
\end{tabular}

The key commands are
\multicolumn{number of columns}{alignment}{text in cell}
\multirow{number of rows}{alignment}{text in cell}

[samden]

Good example of a table with both multirow and multicolumn in it here:
http://andrewjpage.com/index.php?/archives/43-Multirow-and-multicolumn-spanning-with-latex-tables.html

[Ruffed Grouse]

Thanks very much - tried and tried but just couldn't get it right.

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[samden]

No worries, hope it works well for you.