How to align some lines under tabular?

Question

I am using tabular, and I would like to realize something like that:

word1     word2     word3
word4     longerword5
word6     word7     word8

So word1,2,3,4,6,7,8 are well aligned, and I do not want longerword5 to be taken into account for spacing in other rows. Could anyone tell me how to do that?

Answer 1

Do you know the command \multicolumn. The command is defined by latex itself. So you don't need any packages.

The syntax of the command is:

\multicolumn{n}{<justification>}{<contents>}

n is the numbers of columns. The <justification> can be every known one like, r-l-c-p-m.

A small example:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{|lll|}\hline
word in column 1 & word in column 2 & word in column 3 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{words over column 1 to 3}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

How you can see the vertical rules have to set separately by multicolumn.

Answer 2

Either change longerword5 to \multicolumn{2}{l}{longerword5} to make it span over two columns ({2}), left aligned ({l}) or write it as \rlap{longerword5} so that its width is ignored.

As egreg pointed out \rlap{longerword5} (a TeX macro) is equivalent to the LaTeX macro \makebox[0pt][l]{longerword5}. I personally don't think \rlap (lap to the right) is to complicated to be understood by beginners. Instead \makebox[0pt][l] seems to be more complicated.