I am kind of new to web-design and I was wondering how one might change the contents of a cell in a table or an entire table by clicking on a hyper-link, that is, without having to reload the page. I have 56k so I know how bad it sucks to wait for a whole page to load when all you want is a tiny bit of information. Thanks for your help. Hope I adequately explained myself.
No, you haven’t explained yourself. 
Rather than attempt to technically explain it, why not explain it as an ordinary web user. In short what do you want a web user to be able to do?
He wants to be able to click a link and have just part of a page change.
You can do that using frames. Lissa Explains is a great website explaining html for kids, but it’s useful for adults, too. Very simple terms.
When I hit one of those underlined dealies that takes me to other parts of the web, I want a portion of a page, not the whole page to change to show new information. For instance, if I have my phone number in a cell of a table and I want to easily change it to my address, I don’t want to have to wait for another page to load.
thanks for you help!
Also, I don’t particularly like the look of frames. The scroll bar that is… I don’t care for how it seperates parts of pages. Maybe I just want to find a way to hide the scroll bar.
Flash is probably one way; Java is another. I wouldn’t touch frames at all.
However, your self-admission to be a newbie indicates you want to run before you can walk. Better develop some experience in basic HTML and creating ordinary web pages before tackling more intermediate and advanced features.
You may get away with using an IFrame, and there are ways of getting rid of the scrollbar at the cost of accessiblity. But I don’t think you can do it at all without also incorporating some JavaScript. Are you ready to take that plunge? 
A frame won’t have a scrollbar unless the contents of the page it holds is too large for the frame size. If you only want to support all versions of IE and Netscape 6 you could also look at the IFRAME element.
I’m having a hard time imagining a typical scenario in which it is a particularly good idea to change the contents of the page without loading any pages. This would mean all the possible data has already been loaded in the page, and you use javascript to show and hide (or append and remove) various divs (at least, I would recommend using divs) that exist with a cell.
This is basically what dhtml is all about. It has not been used extensively in the past because of a lack of standard implementations. That situation is considerably better now - with IE 5 and later on the Mac, IE 6 on Windows, and Netscape 6 on all platforms there is good standard support for the DOM. If you are OK with providing lousy support to old browsers then you could go this way. The SDMB is not going to be able to teach you DHTML programming, there have been lots of books written on the subject and there is plenty of info on the web. I’d give you a specific reference if I knew any.
To get you started though, I’m pasting a snippet of code you should be able to paste into a document and run in your browser to see one basic approach to what you seem to be talking about.
(note, there are lots of different ways to do this kind of thing…this example may not even be a particularly good method as I haven’t studied DHTML best practices but you should get the idea).
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<SCRIPT language=“javascript”>
function body_onload()
{
addressField.style.visibility = “hidden”;
}
function showElement (element)
{
element.style.visibility = “visible”;
}
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
<BODY onload=“body_onload();”>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div id=“nameField”>The Name</div>
<div id=“addressField”>The Address</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<a href=“javascript:showElement(addressField);”>Show Address</a>
</BODY>
</HTML>
One word for you:
Dreamweaver
It’s worth the money.