Tables (ad-hoc ones) are a beast. Code that aspires to do tame them, looks simple at first then evolve into crazy monsters that die at the altar of excel. Here

Tables (ad-hoc ones) are a beast. Code that aspires to do tame them, looks simple at first then evolve into crazy monsters that die at the altar of excel. Here's a rough progression of (not entirely) imaginary user requirements for an imaginary, general purpose table rendering software. "I just have a bunch of values, can we make this into a table?" "That looks good. You know what would make it great ? Header rows. Just make them stay there while the table scrolls." "Hey! can you give me some icons on the header row for each column that I can click and sort the data ?" "Please give me some pagination!" "Can you fix the sorting logic? A row with id 10 shows up before the row with 2?" "Can you support merging cells ? Please !" "Can you support re-ordering of columns ?" "I want to adjust the width of my columns but the first column should be fixed width" ... A year later... "This is great but you know its kinda slow. My users prefer to do this in excel and paste it here. Hey, here's a great idea, can you just parse data pasted from excel and just make a table from it ?"