Back to the trenches with... speadsheets?

I'm back to reality after my craziest holidays ever. Great new people, and fun with old friends...

And I'm back with some research on spreadsheets.  My new role as team leader involves some team organization and managing skills.  Due to my inability to organize myself, I'm trying to solve this once for all, and it's also a good oportunity to take another look at org-mode.

I've been dabbling with org-agenda and appointments. The git repo has already some '.org' files :).

So today I was watching a few talks from the StrangeLoop 2014, and I stumbled upon this 'Spreadsheets for developers' talk.  The talk has its points. I don't agree with everything that is said there but it does confirm the overally idea I already had of spreadsheets.  Everyone uses them to solve their own problems. It's the emacs of non-developers.

So I remembered org-spreadsheet, and hacked a bit with it.  It's really impressive, and, although a bit cumbersome in the beginning, I think it has lots of potential. And if spreadsheets are code, org-spreadsheet is more code than excel


There are many many different shortcuts but you only need a few to get started.

shortcut	what it does
c-}	toggles column/row legend
c-'	global formula editor
c-`	cell editor (formulas)
c-c c-c (on #tblfm)	updates table recalculating
s-RET	inserts previous number +1

I really encourage you to read the manual and also the tutorial, where you'll find out how to write formulas with Calc or elisp.


Also a nice trick is the org-table-to-lisp function, that will parse the table the cursor is on and give you a list of lists with the data.