CMS Made Simple Forums

I hope someone can point me in the right direction. I am trying to display the output from three columns of a db table on a page.

At the moment I am trying to do it all via html table in a "user defined tag", but I cant get the table formatted properly. Am I going about this the wrong way? I tried doing it via a table on the page then inserting the data in each cell via "user defined tag" but had trouble lining up each row. Is there a better way?

I will answer my own question.
I was not echoing the whole html table format. Also any table attributes eg width, cell charateristics go in single quotes.