Re: [PATCH] Lookup functions, take two

[Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@syk.fi>]

Bastien <bzg@altern.org> writes:

> I feel my brain is a bit slow today... so sorry in advance if the
> question sounds stupid.  What is the advantage of using org-lookup-*
> functions instead of a simple reference in the table formulas?

As noted in the documentation, most often you do something like this
when fetching data from another table (in the case of org, using
remote). I would preferred to include cases like this, but the
tblfm-lines were too long for the resulting PDF... Say I have 100
students, and I want to grade them. I find the sum of their marks, and
then have a grading table for the grades. The lookup function maps the
marks to the grades, as shown in documentation in the second example.

Another application would be, say, mapping your postal code to your
municipality. The "user" would input the postal code, and the table
would automatically fetch the corresponding municipality from another
table.

A third example would be a discount rate that depends on the total sum
of your bill. Or a bonus that depends on how productive you were (given
as a table by the suits).

M*crosoft equivalents, supported by libreoffice, are the hlookup and
vlookup functions:

http://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Spreadsheet_Functions#VLOOKUP

--

Jarmo