I don't quite follow what you want with the table, but it seems like you could nest tables to get the desired effect. The outermost table would have as many columns across as needed; inside each cell is a table with one column and as many rows as needed.
As far as the focus, here is a snippet copied from the source of Google's homepage, it sets focus to to input element. They define a function "sf()", then call the function from the "body" tag's onload event:
...
<script>
<!--
function sf(){document.f.q.focus();}
function c(p){var f=document.f;if (f.action) {f.action = 'http://'+p;f.submit();return false;}return true;}
// -->
</script>
</head><body bgcolor=#ffffff text=#000000 link=#0000cc vlink=#551a8b alink=#ff0000 onLoad=sf()>
...