A DataGrid that supports highlighting and selection on a cellular level (as opposed to row level like the default) is a fairly common request/topic. While I realize people have done this before and this is supported out of the box by Flex 3 (sort of, see first comment below) I decided to give it a shot during some down time yesterday. I was pretty amazed at how easy it was. Even in my newline-happy code format the component is only 55 lines. The results of about 2 hours of fiddling can been seen and downloaded by following the link below.

View CellularDataGrid (Right click for source)

Hopefully someone finds this useful and/or interesting. If nothing else it should serve as an example of why diving into the framework and getting your tweak on is a worthwhile activity.

Update: Thanks to Tom‘s suggestion, the problem with the selection indicator not disappearing correctly when selecting a cell in the same row is now fixed. The example and source have been updated.