Right: at the moment, Form Builder only supports "rowspan", not "colspan" (and there is an RFE for this, which I linked below).
As you said, you can add a colspan "by hand" by editing the source of the form. However, since this is not supported by Form Builder, you can end up in cases where your markup is not recognized or Form Builder does an incorrect change to the markup, which you might have to go fix in the code editor. Now, you've been warned ;).
https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/issues/600Alex
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