Hi Nicolas Goaziou,

Thanks very much for your clarification:

hline relative references are not allowed on the left hand side of a formula

My error message was user-error: Can't assign to hline relative reference, which now makes sense. Still, a lot of folks didn’t understand the original message, myself included. I will update my SO post and the Github issue to reflect this new information.

Still, I am confused because it seems like org-mode used to allow hline references to be assigned, no? My code snippet was taken from a section in the timesheet.el MELPA package, which was working fine until an org-mode update broke it. I may be missing something, so I am not sure if this is the case.

Anyway, your response is very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Luke

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> wrote:

Hello,

Luke Swart <luke.swart@gmail.com> writes:

> There seems to be an error when using hline-relative references in an
> org-mode table’s formula. For example, I have the following org-mode table:
>
> #+BEGIN: columnview :hlines 1 :id global
> | /Project/ | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | /Total/ |
> |----------------+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+------+-----+---------|
> | AnotherProduct | | | | | | 2.50 | | |
> | Prototype | | | | 3.50 | | | | |
> |----------------+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+------+-----+---------|
> | /Daily/ | | | | | | | | |
> #+TBLFM: @I$9..@II$9=vsum($2..$8);%.2f;::@II$2..@III$9='(format
> "%3.2f" (apply '+ '(@I..@II)));N;
>
> and I get the error can't assign to hline relative reference when I run M-x
> org-table-recalculate. I looked over the org-mode references documentation
> <http://orgmode.org/manual/References.html> and the gmane.org forums
> <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/86960>, but I did not find
> any reasons as to why the hline relative references could not be
> assigned.

This is a known limitation: hline relative references are not allowed on
the left hand side of a formula. The error message you get should be
explicit.

There are apparently subtle problems, IIRC, as pointed out in
<http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/86960>.

Regards,

--
Nicolas Goaziou