I started by walking through the basic VTV demo on the Lazarus wiki site, then extending that to all my 13 columns and adding more and more functionality. (next: need to figure out how to implement different pick lists for three of the columns.)
It would be very nice if there was a collection of tips & tricks for VTV in one central location. I've spent a lot of time searching for solutions that turned out to be very simple. I've also spent a lot of time in the virtualstring.pas file, trying to figure out what the various options do and what the various functions really do. The documentation does not provide a good "user manual" approach to using vtv.
I've found the Lazarus portion of my application to be fairly simple compared to the VTV portion of my app.