Help understanding Drupal form creation/content creation
You probably need to explain what you mean by "background processing", i.e. are you looking to save content or do something else?

At any rate, if you really need to template your form to be table based, this is possible by implementing hook_theme. An example entry for a form with an id of example_search_form (this is the argument passed to drupal_get_form() or can be found by looking at the id of the generated form by viewing source) and a template file called example-search.tpl.php looks like:

  $hooks['example_search_form'] = array(
    'arguments' =&gt; array('form' =&gt; NULL),
    'template' =&gt; 'example-search',
  );

  return $hooks;


Then in your example-search.tpl.php you can render individual form items however you would like.