We have a standard use for this - see the
amendment table here.
Scroll down a bit and you'll see spanning cells with Release xxx in them. Ignore the horrible cyan colour; it should be something decent, which is why I wanted to have a proper style.
In technical documents, shaded cells are very common. Another (probably better) example is
here. The blue is used to make the table visually comprehensible, and is a common style in these kind of technical standards (not that specific colour obviously).