I have some code somewhat like this that uses a set of modules I built on top of HTML::Template, rather than using H::T directly (I was hoping to extend it to Excel::Template and PDF::Template, but it appears I won't be so lucky). I can't speak to what the OP is doing, but I know that my application takes a lot of datasets in different sizes and shapes, and has to figure out (or guess) such things as the color-coding of each column on the fly, which is somewhat outside the scope of a generic templating system. That said, using a template module to actually produce the output at the end has made that project a lot easier, and I heartily recommend it.