How should I go about displaying nodes in a list with fields such as an excel spreadsheet

I'm a little confused to how I should start out, what to try fiddle with first.

I want to display my nodes in a listing format like excel, with columns of data that will be entered with each node.
So it'd be like this.

date - Node name - author name - size - URL - picture(link) - topic discussion link/forum - read comments for this node[link] - etc
date - Node name - author name - size - URL - picture(link) - topic discussion link/forum - read comments for this node[link] - etc
date - Node name - author name - size - URL - picture(link) - topic discussion link/forum - read comments for this node[link] - etc

How should I go about modifying drupal to accomidate this? I'm thinking I need to make a whole custom node module like story, with more attributes that can be grabbed by the system for display. I need it so like when I go to create this type of node, I can select to it to a category, fill in the fields like described (like in this post how I can select drupal version, only some of the fields will be text input for links).
Then I'd have the body content be what is shown on the node page along with a header of all the fields information. I also later want to have people be able to order the list by each field. So names would be alphabetical, url and links would be booleans, date would be newest and oldest. My last thought, is that I still want to be able to easily report news about the site. This would be done with story nodes and I guess could be listed on a different page, with a menu item pointing to that.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Regards