[This blog post is a rewrite of just the main points due to my baby Macbook Pro dying while I was distracted.]

Drupal content types with CCK make it quite easy to add any number of defined fields to an 'object', and with multiple/unlimited values for a field or with node references it's possible to make a Drupal node 'two-dimensional'.

Sometimes you need more. Sometimes you want tabular data, a table, to be part of a node. If the table always has the same dimensions, and at least the same columns for each node, then the above can work through node references and views.

What if you want to add a different two-dimensional table to nodes of a content type, but without knowing the number or labels for the columns and rows beforehand.  For example, you might want to attach a pricing table to a node, with multiple products and multiple ways to price each product.  An example of that might be 5 t-shirt designs, where shirts are priced based on size and quantity ordered.