It's an interesting approach, and I like it better than mine, however, I still feel like it's forcing me to "mess with" display logic in the template. I have to start setting bgcolor hash entries which are nothing more than display logic in my data hash. Imagine if I wanted every third row italicized, bolded, or underlined. I'd have to do the same thing (pass it a class in my perl code). Thanks for your help and interesting solutions, I just wish there was a better way. A way in which I can pass the results say directly from fetchall_arrayref to the template and have the template worry about setting the colors.