Formatting text in widget

Hi,

I need to develop a widget that will show records from a database. I'm ok with getting the data out of the database and into the widget.

What I'm wondering about is how I go about formatting the text for display.

I may need to display something like:

column1     column2     column3     column4......etc with all the columns lined up nicely.

At the moment the only way I can think of making this work is to pad the columns of data with spaces before passing them to the widget.

The widget would be in a sidebar. As the total width and height of the text would be variable I would need to make the text scroll horizontally and vertically.

Is this possible? Is there a better way?

Perhaps just showing one record at a time down the widget with buttons for previous/next record is a better option.

I'll need to give the client some options on how this data could be displayed.

Thanks

Mark