The thing about building the query string was that you had two different ways to do it, and once you start using placeholders, the only difference between the two is the column spec that follows "where ". So I used the ternary operator ( (condition) ? expr1 : expr2) to assign a value to $column, and just put that into the common SQL statement.

By the way, when I do something like this with a MySQL database of my own, I get the sort of results that I think you want:

   my @search = qw/%this% %that%/;
   my $sql = "select something from table where column1 like ? or colu
+mn2 like ?";
   my $sth = $dbh->prepare( $sql );
   $sth->execute( @search );
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It also works as expected if the second "like ?" applies to the same column as the first one.

As for the table layout, you might try something like this:

my $left_col = '';
for my $table_row ( @$table_ref ) {
    my @table_cols = map { (defined($_) && /\S/) ? $_ : ' '} @$ta
+ble_row;
    my $cell_str = join( '<br>', "<b>$table_cols[0]</b>", 
                          @table_cols[1..$#table_cols] );
    if ( $left_col eq '' ) {
        $left_col = $cell_str;
    } else {
        push @rows, Tr([ $left_col, $cell_str ]);
        $left_col = '';
    }
}
$page .= table( {-border => 0, width=> 550}, \@rows);
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(expression).

(Again, that's not tested, but it should be close to what you want. Updated to fix the sigils on table_cols in the "join()" expression.)