Different column widths when using multicolumn in tabular enviroment

Question

I'm trying to recreate this table in latex

So far I've managed to get this

Using this:

\begin{table}[h]
\begin{table}[h]
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|p{10cm}|}
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{Daily Log}}\\ \hline
\multicolumn{2}{|l|}{Student Name: My Name} & Student Number: 9999999 \\ \hline
\multicolumn{3}{|l|}{Company Name: A Company Name - Some more text} \\ \hline
Day                     & Date                     & Activities   \\ \hline
1                       & 11/11/13                 & A few sentences of text need to go here for every row from now on\\ \hline
2                       &                          &     \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

But I can't get the Student Number cell to move across without affecting the size of the activities cell. Similarly I want the date cells to be as small as possible but I can't do that because of the size of the student name cell. So really what I guess I'm really asking is, is there a way to change the width of a column on a per row basis?

Answer 1

You can use an inner tabular:

\documentclass{article}


\begin{document}
\begin{table}[h]
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|p{10cm}|}
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|c|}{\textbf{Daily Log}}\\ \hline
\multicolumn{2}{|l}{Student Name: My Name} &            %% note |l
 %% from here
  \multicolumn{1}{l|}{\begin{tabular}[t]{p{1in}|l}      %% adjust 1in as you like
     & Student Number: 9999999 
     \end{tabular}}\\\hline
 %% till here
\multicolumn{3}{|l|}{Company Name: A Company Name - Some more text} \\ \hline
Day                     & Date                     & Activities   \\ \hline
1                       & 11/11/13                 & A few sentences of text need to go here for every row from now on\\ \hline
2                       &                          &     \\ \hline
\end{tabular}%
\end{table}
\end{document}

I get bad box as your table is too wide. Hope in your real document, you have adjusted this properly.