org-table-copy-down feature request

org-table-copy-down feature request

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi Org Devs and Users,

at present, the only reasonable values of org-table-copy-increment are
nil or non-nil.  How about enabling to use it as an increment value?
This would be very useful in the following case: I want to make a table
with dates for subsequent classes (and table is better than headlines
for me, since for each class I put - among others - the number of
problems solved during that class, so that I can use the spreadsheet to
compute the total and average-per-hour numbers; useful for planning for
the remainder of the semester;)).  It would be great to set
org-table-copy-increment to 7 so that I get timestamps increased by one
week.

Another change which would help me might be to have a special value like
'arithmetic, so that the increment could be computed from /this and
previous/ entries. (This might be even better, mimicking
Excel's/LibreOffice's functionality, which is a bit broken in those
applications, since it seems to require a mouse, but is very useful
nonetheless.)

Another, related problem I have with org-table-copy-down is that it
overwrites rows.  It might be better for it to insert a new row /if/
the entry in the next row is nonempty.

What do you think?

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University

Re: org-table-copy-down feature request

[Bastien]

Hi Marcin,

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> at present, the only reasonable values of org-table-copy-increment are
> nil or non-nil.  How about enabling to use it as an increment value?
> This would be very useful in the following case: I want to make a table
> with dates for subsequent classes (and table is better than headlines
> for me, since for each class I put - among others - the number of
> problems solved during that class, so that I can use the spreadsheet to
> compute the total and average-per-hour numbers; useful for planning for
> the remainder of the semester;)).  It would be great to set
> org-table-copy-increment to 7 so that I get timestamps increased by one
> week.

What about accepting an Org formula as the "increment" value?

> Another change which would help me might be to have a special value like
> 'arithmetic, so that the increment could be computed from /this and
> previous/ entries. (This might be even better, mimicking
> Excel's/LibreOffice's functionality, which is a bit broken in those
> applications, since it seems to require a mouse, but is very useful
> nonetheless.)

Yes -- the formula would make this possible too.

> Another, related problem I have with org-table-copy-down is that it
> overwrites rows.  It might be better for it to insert a new row /if/
> the entry in the next row is nonempty.

The default behavior seems TRT here, but an option could refine it.

> What do you think?

Thanks for raising this,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: org-table-copy-down feature request

[Marcin Borkowski]

Dnia 2014-01-27, o godz. 11:55:25
Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> napisał(a):

> Hi Marcin,
> 
> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:
> 
> > at present, the only reasonable values of org-table-copy-increment
> > are nil or non-nil.  How about enabling to use it as an increment
> > value? This would be very useful in the following case: I want to
> > make a table with dates for subsequent classes (and table is better
> > than headlines for me, since for each class I put - among others -
> > the number of problems solved during that class, so that I can use
> > the spreadsheet to compute the total and average-per-hour numbers;
> > useful for planning for the remainder of the semester;)).  It would
> > be great to set org-table-copy-increment to 7 so that I get
> > timestamps increased by one week.
> 
> What about accepting an Org formula as the "increment" value?
> 
> > Another change which would help me might be to have a special value
> > like 'arithmetic, so that the increment could be computed
> > from /this and previous/ entries. (This might be even better,
> > mimicking Excel's/LibreOffice's functionality, which is a bit
> > broken in those applications, since it seems to require a mouse,
> > but is very useful nonetheless.)
> 
> Yes -- the formula would make this possible too.
> 
> > Another, related problem I have with org-table-copy-down is that it
> > overwrites rows.  It might be better for it to insert a new row /if/
> > the entry in the next row is nonempty.
> 
> The default behavior seems TRT here, but an option could refine it.
> 
> > What do you think?
> 
> Thanks for raising this,
> 

You're welcome (and sorry for my delay).

I think the idea with a formula is great.  How do you imagine
overwriting the default one?  With a variable, or in a #+TBLFM line?
(I like the latter idea much better.)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Adam Mickiewicz University