programmer looking for page layout advice

[sa125]

Hi,

I actually come from the coding side of web development (w/ rails), and thought I'd ask for professional design advice here

I have a "products" table that contains many column of data, and as a result extends the width of the screen. Each row deals with a unique person, and contains plenty of attributes (at least 30+ cols). Right now, my table is written as such:

<table>
  <thead>
    <tr><th>name</th></tr>
    <tr><th>supplier</th></tr>
    <tr><th>stock</th></tr>
    <tr><th>manuf.</th></tr>
    <tr><th>price/unit</th></tr>
    <tr><th>location</th></tr>
    <!-- many more cols --> 
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>    
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>    
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>
    <tr><td>Data</td><!-- many more cols --></tr>                
  </tbody>
</table>

I was looking for ideas on how to make this a bit more user presentable, and perhaps avoiding tables altogether. My only concern is that it'll be clean and easy to read, and present the data in a simple yet intuitive manner. Ambitious, I know. I thought about using a mix of <div> and <span> for labels and data for each product, but I lack the foresight to actually visualize it.

I'd appreciate any feedback on this - thanks!

[aeroweb99]

Tables will be your best option for this. There isn't much you can do about scrolling horizontally. What you could do is only display the most pertinent info so there is no scrolling, then link them to a full table page. You can style the table to some extent with css.