Using tables???

My first impulse on moving into this website thingy was to strip it down to the bare floorboards leaving only a sidebar for navigation and the footer for my dog....I am now much intrigued by the use of tables which i would suppose to be usefull for isolating a tight arrangement of content within the main body of the page.....A-T-O has customization options including hover and zebra-isation, and Flynn explains somewhere http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthr...ghlight=tables how to 'create a table in the wordpress editor' and put cups of coffee on it, or else get a second hand one and clean it up.....I took a table spotting trip through the Showing Off thread and was not sure whether i was looking at Tables or simple image inserts untill i arrived at Doc Gurley who would appear to have two tables in her home page at http://www.docgurley.com/. Are these indeed tables or could they be custom fields???......If these are tables they certainly look to be useful and i will look closer into the horendous headbanging of understanding how to manage them.
In the meantime can anyone post a good example of a table to clarify.......jim