Good tools for creating tables, including CSS setup, recommendations?

[Chris G]

I want to be able to create tables for displaying information on web
pages and I'm looking for tools to help me do this.  Most HTML I
either write directly with a text editor or is generated from
reStructuredText but either of these gets very laborious for tables.

What I need to be able to do is:-

    Create and modify tables, add and delete rows and columns easily.

    Change the borders for the whole table consistently and easily,
    specifically I want completely plain (no shadowing) borders in a
    pale colour so they they are not too distracting.

    Make row spans and column spans easily.

    Enter text into the cells.

I can't find anything that even appears capable of doing the above,
let alone make it easy.  The things I have tried are:-

    OpenOffice - a near miss but to save good HTML from Open Office
    you have to Export rather than just save and even then the
    handling of table/cell borders is still somewhat lacking.

    SeaMonkey - It's nice and easy and does most things but it has no
    table/cell border manipulation, it presumably leaves it to CSS so
    one would have to do that by hand.  I want a tool that does the
    CSS as well.

    Bluefish - doesn't seem to offer *any* help with tables at all
    apart from generating an incredibly basic table.

    Kompozer - crashes consistently, it's a known bug, maybe the next
    update will be better.

... and that's about it.

Has anyone any better ideas?  I'm willing to go for a mark-up language
that's good at tables (reStructuredText isn't particularly good) and
do the CSS myself though a WYSIWYG editor would be my ideal as tables
really need WYSIWYG.

Is there really no easy way to do this except DIY?

-- 
Chris Green