Org Tables - From Zero to Hero

how's it going you guys I'm here today to talk to you once again about org mode specifically we're going to talk today about their table functionality tables in org mode can be used for what you'd expect in most other markup languages like HTML and markdown for entering tabular data you know kind of like your name your age all that sort of stuff now another thing that you kind of get with emac and org mode that I find quite powerful is the spreadsheet functionality you can also manipulate the data um using the editor itself so delete adding removing different tables rows fields that sort of stuff but you also get spreadsheet functionality for doing references and calculations which I find super helpful for doing my finances as well as the usual sort of small level uh table functionality that You' kind of hope for when you're referencing other tables you can do a lot of that there um and in addition you can do some really Advanced features where you take these tables you can pass them to an interpreter use a programming language of your choice to do some more advanced features and then spit that out as a that you can use later this is one of the things that I find extremely powerful with emac and let you kind of come up with ideas write it all down so you can reference it later and then get the results that you want and not really think too much about what's the best tool for the job you can kind of just work with it let the data flow as you want and reference it later tables are one of those things that I myself have used more and more over the years and have slowly fallen in love with it's been one of those things that I think org really gets right and hopefully by the end of this video you guys will feel the same way we'll start off with some very basic functionality just designing a table then we'll move into more advanced stuff like manipulating the table using emac and then we'll move into references calculations and the spreadsheet functionality and then finally we'll move into The Interpreter level stuff that's a bit more advanced and extremely powerful now without any more delays let's get into the video so first off let's look at creating a table so tables can be initialized using a quick little just horizontal bar like so and if you just hit tab boom you've got another table just started so usually what I like to do is I usually go ahead and start entering some data so let's say we want to make our heading line name and age and then I can hit Tab and it will start letting me enter in data now often you want to make like a little header so it's a bit nicer because if I just entered in Gavin uh you guys don't need to know my age I'm I'm for all you know I'm 100 uh and then I could keep going but usually you want something to kind of distinguish these two and so to do that you can do a vertical bar and then a and hit Tab and it will sort of fill that in for you and create a little header so that's basically what I say here and you can navigate these guys using tab kind of as you'd expect and then you can use enter um to kind of uh go to the next level now moving on to a more advanced feature we have the ability to actually manipulate these tables um so for example if we wanted to say move things around you can use shift and the arrow keys to kind of move around a field and we'll go ahead and undo that and you could do the same obviously with any of these fields now you can also use meta to kind of move say an entire column around or an entire row around um and in addition you can use shift in combination with meta with down to add one and then with up to delete it my up key is broken so I can't show that um and then you can do some extra stuff with rows as well so right would add a row left would delete a row or sorry column which is quite powerful and quite helpful for sort of the general manipulation stuff obviously it depends on where the cursor is but yeah so that's kind of the main workflow for sort of manipulating the table is using the arrow keys with different modifiers you can obviously do the regular sort of marking deleting and moving stuff around as you'd expect now another thing when it comes to modifying the different data is that sometimes you want to copy paste and so the way that this is done is actually pretty interesting so you can do control space here and kind of move your cursor around and so you can do kind of row and column selection like this so while it does show that I'm going across two lines I'm actually selecting from this little rectangle right here and so I can do crl c CR X and then any of these Keys above us let's do alt W and so as you can see it said that I copied and so now if I do contrl c crl xrl y it will paste that data um and I can kind of do say for example if I did here and went down to here and did crl C CR X Alt W and copied like we just did and then do crl c CR XR y um we can copy and paste just the column right here um so this can be very helpful and very powerful if you guys want to do some more like modifications and moving things around without uh disrupting the actual layout too much now I'll admit I don't use this all the time but it is helpful on the occasions where I kind of feel like I need it and now let's move on to generating tables generating tables is actually a really cool feature Within emac there's a bunch of different ways to do it this is just two of them so uh one of the ways is using control and then the vertical bar and so you'll see it right down here in my like what I'm typing so you can kind of turn anything that's comma separated or tab separated into a table um so this is really useful like I mentioned if I just copy pasted say a list from a website or something like that I can uh select the region do contrl c vertical bar and it will turn that into a table now another example is using U Altex or table import and then I can just go to results this is just an example CSV that I have right here this was kind of a bad spot to import it um let's undo that and import it here so we'll just get the same thing that we did last time we import it and you as you can see right here we imported uh the entire table and we can kind of navigate it as you'd expect and uh move things around as you'd expect um yeah and so this is kind of a nice way to kind of take like a CS V or a tsv like I mentioned here tab separated value and kind of import it as you did hopefully okay now we can get into the actual calculations which is one of the really cool things about org mode so there's a few different ways to enter them but we'll go through them one at a time so there's control equals which will let you enter a calculation for a column so right now uh this is pretty arbitrary but let's go ahead and just change this to 10 12 and then let's make this column some sort of a calculation so what we can do is we can do contrl C equals and then we can say that it is that this column is column one plus 10 hit enter and it will apply that for the column if we go and remove that cuz that doesn't really matter there we go now we get the sort of calculation that you'd expect so each of these guys plus 10 and so the dollar sign is how you specify a row now you can also do an extra calculation say if you want to do control U contrl C equals then you can make it specific to the field and say let's just make this field equal to 10 minus 20 um which equals -10 um and as you can see they're all added down here into this table FM which I think is short for table format is kind of what they're going for and so this is kind of used to do some calculations and kind of just display the results up here now you can kind of uh recalculate them if you wanted to modify them so let's say move minus this to 10 and then we do contrl c contr c or if you want to just do it specific to a field you can do contrl c star which is useful but really these sort of General things I'm just showing off for the sake of it we'll get into some more advanced and actually useful uh ways to sort of modify these values in just a second so when we move on to references we actually get some really Advanced features and so this kind of makes the actual calculations a bit nicer so as you can see right down here I make a small reference to the second row in the second column remember that dollar sign indicates that this is the column and the at symbol indicates that this is a row now there's a few different ways that you can manipulate them as I mentioned here you can do contrl c uh quote single quote contrl C single quote will give you the current calculation so right now we have this set to calculate to one but we can instead say that we want to do plus and then let's say we want to do at one uh dollar sign two and so it will indicate where that is now instead let's like go ahead and change that to the right and then down and so now it will be one plus that entry and we can do contrl c contrl c to save that and there we go and when we recalculate it using contrl C control C you'll see that it is computed now just like before we can edit it once again and say maybe we want to uh change this to a 10 or 101 I guess there we go we'll make it 10 and then contr C contr C and then and we can re-evaluate it I find this sort of a workflow to be much better than the uh one I talked about before um but it's most effective when you're using it with references I find now if you ever get confused you can do a contrl c uh curly brace this will kind of give you a bit of a layout and kind of breakdown of what you're looking at if you want to know what it is for one of the field you can do contrl c question mark and like I said before contrl c contrl c aligns things once again here's a little breakdown of how references work so at references a row the dollar sign references a column if you want to reference something say like very last element in a range and you can use the greater than symbol and then if you want to specify a range you can use two dots so here's a really good example now an alternative notation instead of having to control C quote or any of these other things you can actually just do a colon equals to enter in a calculation so here we're saying that we want the second row in the First Column so that's this guy all the way to the third row in the second column so we're selecting this region right here all right and so if I just hit tab boom that expands and we get the actual calculation and as you can see it's one right here if we go through you'll notice that it lines up with this one this guy this guy this guy and we created a range from that and as you can see that calculation ends up down here so this is a really quick way to just sort of write some quick shorthand if you just want to do like a quick calculation like we were talking about before like 10 + 20 tab you get the calculation kind of like what you'd expect now what if we want to reference other tables now this is a really awesome feature I use this all the time for the accounting stuff that I was talking about before so let's say we have uh some things and costs so we say that car costs x amount of money house costs x amount of money and so we could have some calculations down here but in this case we don't and then we can actually reference it so here we use remote to indicate that this is a reference we're referencing costs which comes from Up here we labeled this table as costs and then we're saying that we want the element right here all the way to this element which uh really is only two things that I could have said but I created a range from it so second row all the way to the third row both in the second column and then I am using vs sum to sum these results and as you can see right here if I um remove that or let's just remove that and recalculate it you'll see that the results align and we can sort of uh change this to and recalculate and we get the updated result now if you're wondering where uh all of the powers of adding subtracting and everything come from it's using a thing in emac called Kelk um which you guys can find in the info if I go ahead and take a look at it it's a stack-based calculator um it's very powerful I'm pretty sure it even has like Taylor series generation a bunch of different stuff like generating Graphics as you can see basically anything you see here arithmetic it can do linear algebra um it could do a lot of advanced math stuff that you guys can put in your tables obviously I don't take advantage of that all the time um but from time to time it can be super useful now when Kelk isn't enough this is when I reach out to org Babble org Babble is a way to sort of execute code from within an org file I haven't made a video on it but there's lots of videos out there for those of you interested um but there's pretty cool stuff that you can do with it so let's go ahead and do a really simple example using a table so the really simple one is just generating results so here I have a source block using python and I say return a uh list containing the values from zero all the way up to five and so if I hit control C control C to execute it I'll get a range of 0 1 2 3 and four now we can also uh take data and pass it in so for example I have a table here I have named it note that I didn't use the table name this is just a generic name that we can use this is how you can label basically everything in org mode is using the hash plus name and so we named it messages and they're from and to somebody and then we actually take that and as you can see right here with VAR we're actually passing that in as a variable called data and we're actually using emac list this time not just python um so for those of you guys that don't have python installed very impressive that you don't have installed but uh you can actually do this with just regular emac list that will work everywhere um and so basically what I do here is I iterate over that data which we passed in up here and we go through and we go through each row and we print from Two and we get the first element that's given to us which is Jim and the second element which is John all right and so if we go ahead and execute that you'll see we get the results of from Jim to John from Tim to Drake from Griff to step uh questionable names there at the end hey just coming in to interrupt the video to talk about today's sponsor brilliant brilliant is an online learning platform when it comes to learning a lot of us jump to things like tutorials and lectures and really miss out on being able to absorb everything that we're being told this is where brilliant really stands out it gives you interactive real world examples that you can think through and problem solve and really retain the information that you're learning in this video I show you how you can use org tables and integrate them with different programming languages and interpreters if this is a New Concept to you I highly recommend taking a look at the computer science fundamentals course from them that goes a bit into the basic ideas of programming that a lot of new programmers can learn a lot from and you can start applying what we talk about at the end of this video in those Advanced features as you go if furthering your career knowledge or education interests you I highly recommend giving a look at brilliant to try everything brilliant has to offer now for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org gaven Freeborn or click on the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription once again thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video okay so let's think of a practical application for those of us that do programming so in this case let's say we have a database and in this case I have one that is an SQL light database containing multiple restaurants so if I do contrl c contrl c we'll see that we can get the results like we were doing before as a table now this is a little messy so we can go sort of clean this up by executing this which will actually filter out by the important data now this is quite good and we can kind of like we were saying before manipulate these uh different guys as you'd expect so kind of adding a row removing a row if we want to filter down to maybe just like the location there you go now while exporting these results is useful sometimes you want to take them in as input so let's go ahead and do that with another SQL light database so we have a table right here it says Who and the task that they have we have two tasks for gaven that's me and then some other tasks for some other people now in this case I'm going to uh set a variable and we're going to set that variable to be called some data and it's going to take our table as we can see up here called test table uh and we do some extra settings I'm not really going to get dig into those and we say that the DB is just a temporary database that we'll be using and we'll say that we're going to drop this table if it already exists um just for this Demo's purpose and then we will import it and so now if we contrl C control C on this we will see that it's able to select who and task where the who is Gavin and so as you can see right here it selected just the ones that were tasks for me now just to prove that I'm not making this up we can go ahead and use emac to actually open this and if if we open up the database you can see that it's all the original data that we originally entered in you can do a lot of this stuff with basically any SQL light database um as well as any SQL in general database um there's a bunch of information both these links that you can find in these show notes and finally we'll move on to another Advanced feature using the org Babel integration um so this is a bit more of a breakdown of what's going on here so in this case we're going to use the r programming language to do some mathematical stuff do note that the ES s package is what's used to give us our source code functionality once you have the ESS package installed you can also set up the org Babble functionality for R by just uh executing this eisp and here let's go ahead and dig into it so here we have a table which has each month of the year and then what the temperature was and so we can kind of plot this out so here we're going to once again take that table up there turn it into Data we're going to say that our results will be a graphical file we'll say that that file is going to be a PNG um and that way we will export it I think that's what the exports was I can't actually remember what I entered that part in for we'll plot it and then we give it a legend for the plot and we can hit contrl C control C and then you can use as I mentioned down here crl C CR x contrl v to preview it and as you can see we generated a very nice graph um to get the data that we wanted I know that gnu plot also can do this sort of stuff but if you guys wanted to do statistics and stuff um R is there and you can use something like gnu octave if you wanted to do uh linear algebra that maybe kelt can't do um or anything like that there's a lot of functionality out there if this interest you guys uh be sure to check out simx I think that's how they expect you to pronounce it um which is basically an emac setup meant for uh scientists and Engineers um which is really cool I've looked at that in the past obviously for me it doesn't really make sense because I'm so used to emac but uh for those of you that aren't it might be a very interesting starting point so where does this functionality leave us well in the end we have quite a lot of power that we can use to automate our lives do things like Financial calculations daily life calculations very advanced stuff for maybe generating a graph or a plot if you guys want to learn more about how I use it maybe how I do some of my finances um and maybe some more advanced features that you can do with org mode and tables be sure to let me know down in the comments now before I let you all go I wanted to give a big shout out to my supporters on patreon and GitHub sponsors you guys mean the world to me and you guys have done so much to support the channel and kind of keep keep things going uh in between sponsors which I really [Music] appreciate

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/GavinFreeborn . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. This tutorial focuses on Emacs's org-mode's table functionality. Tables on a surface level are simple. However, with the power of org-mode they become a spreadsheet system, time-tracking tool, programming tool, and much more. Small correction the reason I used :export both was for use with org export. I should have removed that from the version used in this video. One package I recommend checking out is https://github.com/casouri/valign if you work with lots of images and latex fragments. It does a better job at aligning the table in these cases than default emacs does. Show notes https://gist.github.com/Gavinok/f5fdb853e62d730be650b5ad413657e5 Let me know what you think and if there is anything specific you would like to learn about. ----------------► Wanna Support Me? ◀︎---------------- Github: https://www.github.com/sponsors/gavinok Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/gavinfreeborn ----------------► Wanna Checkout My Dots? ◀︎---------------- Vimrc: https://github.com/Gavinok/dotvim Emacs Config: https://github.com/Gavinok/emacs.d ----------------► Come Join The Community◀︎---------------- LBRY: https://odysee.com/@GavinFreeborn:d Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/%23gavinfreeborn:matrix.org Discord: https://discord.gg/JJk5KKU This video was sponsored by Brilliant TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:50 Creating a table 4:56 Generating tables 6:11 Calculations 7:43 References 12:07 Using Tables For Org Babel 18:22 Conclusion