I'm using an Excel 2007 worksheet to arrange school schedules, with columns
for date, session time, teacher name etc. Each day covers three rows, with
one cell for each session that day.

To make it easy to read, it is useful to have one column with some cells
merged (for the dates, and also to show that a particular course is running
over several days or weeks).

I've set up a pivot table referring to this data, but obviously the cells
'behind' the merged cells are blank. is there any way of getting all the
cells within a merged area to contain the same data? or another neat
workaround?

For the dates, i've set up a formula in another column to have multiple
cells referring to a single location. The trouble is that the courses are all
different lengths, and don't follow a particular pattern.

thanks for your help.