I deal with a lot of data in tabular form, and I like to have as much of it in front of me at once as I can. The biggest influence on my report design has been, believe it or not, iTunes: no more padding than necessary, zebra striping, fast and easy sorting, and something like a column browser if possible. I've been using DataTables happily for years.

One thing I've been experimenting with lately is sorting vs. showing. If I'm pulling data from Jira, and an issue is blocked, do I need a separate boolean column to sort or filter, or is it enough to style another column (say, age)? In a table with a hundred or more rows, will an orange, red, or bold red value in a single cell stand out enough for me to recognize something I need to address now?

Looking at the table view of this experiment, the things I like are:

* live updating

* stable sorting for multiple columns

* row highlight on hover

* dimming the trailing zeros

* colors aren't overdone; basically just three pairs of colors

* graph in the 24H Low/High column, kind of like a sparkline

The things that don't land as well with me:

* horizontal scroll bar is almost invisible

* the wide vertical scroll bar with the graph

* how does 24H Low/High actually sort?

* no filtering (although it may not be essential for this data source)

The other thing I notice, comparing this to some of my own reports, is that there isn't much variance in the width of the values. It's harder to manage column widths with text than a bunch of numbers.