AJAX checkboxes in Views to change node values
If you can "do it easily enough by creating a table and manually filling the cells," you can easily leverage Views' global custom text field along with rewriting to create whatever you need.  For example, create a view with whatever you want in the fields, just make sure one of them is nid. Then add a global custom text field after all of them and craft up whatever AJAX divs or spans or ids etc you need to call your functions, substituting the nid token where necessary in the markup.  Make sure that javascript is including on your page and you should be on your way.