Clearly this passes for humour wherever you live :) Obviously when you only need a list and you have a small amount of read only data, then yes maybe you can manually add your items to a listview or listbox. But if you want any sort of complex databound list or an editable table, grids are your only choice. Then what about grouping, filtering available in commercial solutions all of which are necessary in commercial software. And whilst embedding an excel worksheet is an idea, again it is manual and very very slow - not to mention relying on excel being present....... :(