James Dyer has an interesting post on using Gnuplot to plot data from Org tables. Gnuplot is my go to utility for plotting data but its syntax is, to put it mildly, convoluted and since I don’t use it all that often, it’s always a struggle to get a working graph. Dyer’s method seems less complicated—at least for simple cases—so it’s worth taking note of how he did it.
This post is mainly a note to myself but other occasional Gnuplot users who want to produce graphs from the data in an Org table may find it useful too. The TL;DR is that you specify a #+PLOT: line for the table that lists the parameters for the graph you wish to plot.
As Dyer illustrates, you can also easily produce a bar plot within the table itself with the orgtbl-ascii-draw command. It’s use is pretty much self explanatory from Dyer’s post but it’s also documented at the #+PLOT link.
Dyer’s post is short but has a surprisingly useful kernel. It’s definitely worth taking a look at it if you ever need to plot data contained in an Org table.