Others have given you suggestions about creating the actual HTML tables. I'll just say that, if you have any control over the data itself, do yourself a giant favor and store it with the full date as the key. The way you have it with the year-month as the key, you will never have unique keys and any value of storing them in a DB_File (or any other hashed system) will be lost. If instead of having "2005-jan" as the key and "11-rented" as the value, have "2005-jan-11" as the key and "rented" as the value. That will give you unique keys and it will also eliminate the need to parse the serialized value. Even better, store the dates using numerical months as yyyy-mm-dd e.g. "2005-01-11" so you can order the dates properly. If you know SQL at all, you'd be best off using SQLite or MySQL or using DBD::DBM to keep using DB_File but with a DBI/SQL frontend.