Hopefully you can see straight away that the simple structure provided by org-mode gives a nice way to keep an electronic note book.
Often it is nice to include tables in our notes. Org handles this by using | to separate columns, and a line of — (inserted with C-c -) to add horizontal lines.
- when you get to the “s” of comments, press TAB to go to the next line
- go up to the previous line and use C-c - to add the row of dashes
- next enter a few lines of data, using TAB to go through the cells - you should notice the columns changing width as needed
| ID | x | y | comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 2 | 4 | blah |
| B | 3 | 9 | blah |
| C | 4 | 16 | blah blah blah |
| D | 5 | 25 | blah |
| FIRST NAME | LAST NAME | FULL NAME |
|---|---|---|
| AYUSH | GARG | AYUSH GARG |
| ARNIM | GARG | ARNIM GARG |
| VISHAL | GUPTA | VISHAL GUPTA |
Now, you can move rows and columns around using M-arrow and insert or delete rows and columns using M-S-arrow. Try this out now.
Exercise: start typing in this table below; type the first line in verbatim
You can create an empty table using C-c | to run the command org-table-create-or-convert-from-region, which will prompt for table dimensions if no region is selected.
The same command can easily convert some text to a table; select the following text and use C-c | to run the command org-table-create-or-convert-from-region again to convert the text to a table
ID x y A 2 4 B 3 9 C 4 16 D 5 25
You can also save tables to their own files by putting the cursor in the table and using M-x org-table-export. You’ll be asked for a file name and a format. For the format, type orgtbl-to and press TAB to see the available options (e.g. orgtbl-to-csv will convert to csv in the output file).
You can use formulae to do arithmetic on tables, and use them like a spreadsheet. This is something I keep meaning to use more often, but don’t generally find I need it. One useful command is C-c + which runs org-table-sum to sum the numbers in the current column.
For more on this, see e.g. this introduction. Notice that we just added a link in our org-mode file - this is a teaser for what we will cover next!