When splitting cells manually Word 2016 seems to know about its context and will offer set values depending on other merging/splitting within the table that intersect the cell.

Is it possible to access this functionality using the split command or am I just being too hopeful.

For example if I am splitting a cell and the column to the left has two rows equivalent to my selected cell and the the column to the right has eight cells the when I click the up arrow for the number of cells I will be offered 2, 4, 8 for successive clicks.

An alternative would be a pointer to a macro that can take a table with vertiically and horizontally merged cells and return the table to a 'uniform' status.

Or am I in for another loooong night?

In case you are wondering I have numerous tables in a document to update and the previous author has kindly merged cells rather than turning the cell borders off and my updates are in the merged areas.