This is highly application-specific. If you're looking for components to use in some design, for example, it's useful to have the component value, power rating,

This is highly application-specific. If you're looking for components to use in some design, for example, it's useful to have the component value, power rating, cost, form-factor, etc, all displayed together and filterable/sortable. If the application doesn't allow for filtering in this context, then that's something that the user ends up doing mentally. Worse, if the application doesn't allow all this information to be displayed as a summary, you end up with 50+ products for which you have to manually click a link and skim the product brief of each one individually. For example, here's Newarks's procuct chooser [1]. You can sort and filter by any field. It remains uncluttered by default-populating only the most commonly-used fields, but it avoids sacrificing any capabilities via making these hidden fields easy to access (click the "extended" button right above the table header). I'd like to point out that in lists like these, the parent comment is 100% correct in saying "[the] cost of allowing filtering by anything is minimal". And while I'm sure an experienced designer could improve the UI, this is a scenario in which sacrificing capability for beauty is absolutely an inappropriate thing to do. [1] http://www.newark.com/eeprom http://www.newark.com/eeprom