Org Table Edit

Summary

This package provides the command orgtbl-edit for editing spreadsheets and text-delimited files as Org tables.

Installation

This package can be cloned from GitHub via the following command:

git clone https://github.com/shankar2k/orgtbl-edit.git

To start using it, place it somewhere in your Emacs load-path and add the line

(require 'orgtbl-edit)

in your .emacs.d/init.el file. Then run M-x orgtbl-edit to run it.

If you use use-package, you can configure this as follows:

(setq orgtbl-edit-load-path "<path to orgtbl-edit dir>")
(use-package orgtbl-edit
  :load-path orgtbl-edit-load-path
  :ensure nil)

Usage

To use this command, simply invoke orgtbl-edit and then select a spreadsheet (e.g., xlsx, odt) or text-delimited file (e.g., csv, tsv) to edit as an Org table.

If the file provided is a text-delimited file, then the field separator is automatically detected after skipping forward orgtbl-edit-header-lines from the beginning of the buffer. The field separator can be a tab, comma, or space.

The file is opened in a special buffer that has orgtbl-mode enabled, so that all org-table- and orgtbl- commands work in the buffer. When the buffer is saved, the table is exported back to the original spreadsheet or text-delimited file in its original format.

Notes

• For spreadsheets formats such as xlsx and ods, because orgtbl-edit uses a CSV file as an intermediate format, when saving, all formatting and formulas will be lost.
• orgtbl-edit can edit any spreadsheet file supported by org-odt-convert (typically any file supported by LibreOffice)