: What are some alternative layout options for product tables that have a lot of repetition? I'm working on a print product catalogue where each product has all of its variations listed in tables.

@Kevin459

I didn't read the question properly the first time, and actually recommended the same thing you said you were thinking about doing.

As I think it is the best option, I'll just provide some reasoning for why.


The duplicated information in your table makes it look like ~30 individual products, and is an absolute pain to read and find something.
There is rarely a good reason to duplicate information to such an extent.
As you stated "There are only 6 widths", but that is impossible to tell straight away from the table you currently have.


To state it the way I understand it:


You're only selling 6 distinct products, with 20 colour variations for each product.


This should be immediately obvious. This should be the starting point for your design.

So your design goals would be:


Show that there are 6 products
Show that for each product, there are 20 variations.




My advice is, do not duplicate all of that content. Use the duplicate content to define a single product, and then provide the colour variations in that product as a separate "dataset" nearby.



Mockup made with Google Spreadsheets

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@Murray976

I don't know ultimately how feasible this is without applying it to all the data. However using merely two rows for each product could be an option.

Combining the #s with the corresponding color and breaking it out of the common product information would seem to be a good way to eliminate the overall repetition and size of the table.



Even if you were to use 4 rows per product - 1 to define size then 3 rows of 5 colors each for product codes - that may be better than 20 rows per product.

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