Views and fields

In Drupal 5, I want to control how, when and where my Views output fields is presented. Not being a coder this could be a problem. There are some nice tutorials on how to deal with the problem (sort of), and even some excellent modules like Active Templates and Views own Theme Wizard. If one, with the help of these modules, would like to handle the fields in a fine grained manner you still need to have some skills in PHP/Drupal programming. One other way on how to handle this would be with CSS and visibility: hidden. But when using the CSS technique the hidden objects seams to have influence on the layout and is therefore a better solution when the number of hidden fields is limited.

It's not only the fields generated by user input but also fields generated by other modules as well. I have been trying to solve the problem with the Active Templates module. The nice thing about this module is that one can view the generated HTML in the Template Node Variables window. In my case it's not only HTML generated by user input but also fields generated by the excellent Node Relativity module, which in this case, is use to group children nodes. Is there a way to handle module generated output, besides going in to the actual module and strip out the unwanted fields? I hope there is! How precise can one handle the generated HTML? and how and where do I start looking for examples? I would really appreciate some detailed answers in this matter. I have been struggling with this for a couple of weeks now, and is on my way of giving up, at least for a day or two ;-)