Mike Zamansky is back with another video in his Using Emacs Series. This time it’s about Org tables and their spreadsheet capabilities. One of Zamansky’s duties as a Hunter professor is to evaluate Macaulay Honors College applications. Like many of us, his first idea was to set up an Org table to help with the processing.
His input is a list of names and ID numbers. He began by importing the list into an Org table and then adding columns for the various rating criteria. He needed an average for some of the columns and a total score column to capture a summary of each student’s rankings. As Zamansky says, you could do this with a spreadsheet but Org tables have extensive spreadsheet capabilities built in so there’s no reason to leave the comfort of Emacs1.
The built in functions for Org tables are from the Emacs Calc utility and are quite extensive. However, sometimes you need something that’s not provided. Being Emacs, it is, of course, easy to do. You can evaluate Elisp in place of the built in functions and Zamansky shows how to do that.
As usual, the video is definitely worth your time. It’s 12 minutes 45 seconds long so it should be easy to find time to watch it.
Footnotes:
My record keeping and workflow uses several spreadsheet-like tables but I never fire up an actual spreadsheet. Everything is done in Emacs with Org tables.