http://tinyurl.com/dyjfmf

i must be real dumb or a noob or both.

i just want the bgcolor on the first col to stop when the words stop so i was thinking i might have to just make another row or something else but i've been trying to figure it out for a good hour. thanks

Wrap the text in a DIV and use CSS to apply the background color to that rather than to the TD.

Thank you , but either that didn't work or you didn't explain it well enough. plus i already have divs on the page i think that might just mess them up wouldn't it? thanks, please any suggestions with the table, i was trying to mess around with the colspan and rowspan tags but couldn't seem to figure it out. anyone? thank you.

No, it won't. Put the DIV inside the TD and the text inside the DIV. Maybe you didn't remove the background color from the TD?

oh i got it now, div STYLE equals background color #xxxxx not just div

thanks

Yeah, as I said, use CSS.
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/