Andreas Gerler has a nice post that shows how to access individual table columns in a source block. If you don’t do this sort of thing frequently, it’s easy to forget the details. If you occasionally need this capability or think you might, bookmark this post so you have an easy way to reacquaint yourself with the procedure.
I haven’t written about using Org source blocks for a long time but they are tremendously powerful. If, for example, you’re writing up a lab report for a class, this is a wonderful way to put your data and exact calculations in the same file and then export the parts you want to turn in to a nicely formatted PDF file.
Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s just reproducible research writ small. If you’re out of school and producing reports or writing up results, the process is just as useful. I use this type of thing all the time in my day to day work and consider it one of the great things about Org mode and Emacs. If you want to see an another example of this sort of thing, I wrote about it here.