You'll have to implement half of the functionality from the abstract view. Things like index positions, etc. Practically all you can take from QHeaderView is the inheritance, so that you can use it with a table view. But it might be inpractical (you'll have to reimplement some of the table view functionality as well). It might be easier to instead implement your own header (for example composited from two or more QHeaderView instances) and couple it with the table.