I created a table in blender. I set up the camera and lighting as normal, but my final render keeps showing up as grey.
Hi there, and welcome to BA! 
That image doesn’t help us much. You already told us your result is grey, and indeed, it looks grey. You probably pressed a key somewhere accidentally that (un)set something you didn’t notice.
Could be any number of things. Have you checked whether your objects are all visible in renders? This looks remarkably like you made everything invisible, and your world background is the default grey. Yup, that just takes one keypress, I do it by accident way too often.
If that’s not it, best would be to share your file. You’re new, so you need to either spend 10 min browsing the forum, reading posts, showing some activity, so you can upgrade your trust level which will let you upload your file, or you can just upload it to an external storage site and share the link here.
My first thought is to make sure that there is an active camera in the scene that’s visible for the render. Check to make sure it’s not in a disabled collection or been deleted.
hi! thank you for responding. the camera appears as visible and when i switch to camera view, works perfectly fine. I have attached a screenshot of my set up here ---------->
Hello, thank you for responding. I believe my objects are visible, however, I do not know what key you could be referring to. I will attach my file in a later reply, after browsing for 10 minutes so I can upload it.
One odd thing to me is I don’t see the usual camera icons (looks like a DSLR from the front) beside the eye icons in your scene outliner, which is the list of things in your scene at the top-right of the blender window. You can enable the visibility of that toggle in this menu here:
The problem could also be a view layer issue. If you go to the composition tab, then enable use nodes, you should see that your scene view layer matches the view layer selected in the “Render Layers” node. Like this:
If none of that works, something you could try is create a new scene, delete everything in the scene, then append your collection from the problem scene to the new scene.
Yup, your table is set to be invisible in renders.
Note that little camera icon next to your Cube.002. I noticed that missing in your screenshot, and @Broccolium showed you how to display those.
Oh, forgot: keys to make things invisible – h does it for selected objects. SHIFT-H hides all unselected objects – if no object is selected it hides everything (that’s the one that gets me). ALT-h makes everything visible again.
I’m actually having issues with this now, myself. I did everything above, nothing is hidden, I have a light source, and I have my camera set up. It’s just a simple animation lol.
Check the compositor.
I did, nothing seemed wrong there. Granted, I started using blender yesterday, so I might’ve missed something.
Can you post an image of your collection? (Drag it down so it shows everything). Maybe also post the .blend file and I will take a look later today.
