Hacker News Reader

Comment by sulami | Hacker News Reader

I’ll be that one person:

org-mode already does tables with formulas and all[1], if you’re interested in text-based spreadsheets

[1]: https://orgmode.org/manual/Tables.html

Yes! Nicely integrates with almost everything through org-mode's babel [1] (those not familiar with Emacs, org-mode babel is like Jupyter notebook on steroids). If you find org-mode table column formulas complicated, you can use other languages instead. Here is example with R [2].

For me org-mode became interface to glue other tools and languages, plus I get documenting facility for free. Just like bash/shell for unix tools.

[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

[2] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html#spread...

That got a good laugh out of me. Very org-mode-user of you to call Babel "Jupyter notebook on steroids". Anyone else would take one look and say "wtf are you talking about?"

Uhm, could you elaborate? Org mode/Babel supports many languages and is feature rich. Why would you say, the statement "Babel is Jupyter notebook on steroids" is laughable?

Honestly, I meant that lightly. My apologies. I found it humorous because it followed the (gui-version)^2 format of emacs-like tool endorsements.

If you want an actual reason, the two are not even close. Jupyter is a multi-langauge kernel _server_. Also most of its users are data scientists and the things they care about are pandasDfs, charts, tables which makes html rendering much more capable. You might say there are plugins and ways to do all the things I mentioned org mode/babel, but that misses the point. They're very different products.

That probably just means he or she thinks Org Mode looks ugly. People are shallow and way too into looks. At least that's what I tell myself when I fail to get people interested in Org mode. :)

And markdown-mode provides similar easy table editing for Markdown. This is what I have been using primarily on Linux.

On the Mac I also use TableFlip [1], which provides an Excel-like interface for tables and works with any Markdown editor that automatically reloads a file on changes. It's a one-time purchase, no subscriptions.

[1] https://tableflipapp.com

That looks cool. But if you want to have only one application to do the job, there is another option.

One thing that's really nice is using org-mode tables in another mode. For example, I use it for LaTeX tables. I edit the table inline using org-mode then "compile" it into the LaTeX version before saving the document. It's really cool.

I enable orgtbl-mode automatically in markdown-mode for that reason. It's the table bit as a minor-mode that you can use in any major mode.

Recent convert but org mode columnar sums still look a bit tricky.

M-x org-md-export-to-markdown is my friend!

Sums of a whole column in org mode tables is among the simples formulas you can write for tables. Just call the sum function (vsum?), enter the start cell and end cell, and where you want to put the result. That's it. Except that it is text only, I don't see what's more difficult, than entering a formula in a GUI spreadsheet app.

I used org-mode tables to tabulate student grades for a course I was teaching last semester. Summing single columns was okay. But I needed to drop selected assignments (had a column with 1s and 0s). And then had to figure out the percentage marks each student had in the assignment component.

It was honestly a huge pain. I could have written the formulas for this in under 15 min on a regular spreadsheet software. With org-mode I spent hours trying to figure it out. In the end I had a hacky solution that I don't want to use again.

The examples on the web have weird markup

I should write some examples for tables and put them in a repo somewhere. You are right, sometimes the examples require a bit of trying and a lot of thinking, before one can apply them. That should not be. However, once you figure it out, it is amazing ;)

Please do!

..one person?

I admire your optimism.

this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com