Feature request: ability to refer to other tables

Feature request: ability to refer to other tables

[Nikos Apostolakis]

First of all thanks for org mode, it's a great piece of software.  I
am not organized enough to take full advantage of its abilities but
I plan to get more organized Any Day Really Soon Now.  But I do
regularly use the table feature and especially the spreadsheet
abilities.  I use org-mode for all my spreadsheet needs.  

I think that the ability to refer to the contents of a table cell
from outside of the table and in particular from another table would
be very useful.  Tables could have labels associated with them and
then one could refer to their cells in a fomat like "label@3$2" or
even "/path/to/filename/label@3$2".  

Thanks,
Nikos

Re: Feature request: ability to refer to other tables

[Carsten Dominik]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 14:51, Nikos Apostolakis wrote:

> First of all thanks for org mode, it's a great piece of software.  I
> am not organized enough to take full advantage of its abilities but
> I plan to get more organized Any Day Really Soon Now.  But I do
> regularly use the table feature and especially the spreadsheet
> abilities.  I use org-mode for all my spreadsheet needs.
>
> I think that the ability to refer to the contents of a table cell
> from outside of the table and in particular from another table would
> be very useful.  Tables could have labels associated with them and
> then one could refer to their cells in a fomat like "label@3$2" or
> even "/path/to/filename/label@3$2".

I am hesitant to do this, because these simple ASCII tables are
so easily modified.  For example, just insert a line and the reference
is incorrect. While Org-mode modifies the local formulas if you use
the correct commands to insert and delete lines, there is no simple
way to make formulas in other tables, let alone in other files, realise
that a change has occurred.  There is also a technical reason:
The whole engine that parses a table and finds out which reference
points where is designed for a single active table at a
time - would be a lot of work to change this.  Right now, this does
not seem worth the effort, unfortunately.

- Carsten