The message 20090117184014.GA5305@v-shell-1 from Chris G cl@isbd.net contains these words:
I might take a look at Open Office, I assume that can generate HTML, what's its tables like?
Tables are more reliable than columns IME. And yes, you can save as HTML - however, I use the Notepad approach, even when using a HTML editor I (mostly) subject it to a 'Notepad' job.
When I'm writing several pages I tend to have a number of text templates to copy and paste into a text document, text etc typed in and which is then saved with a .html extension.