It might be hard to admit it for us Emacsers but most of us are pretty comfortable using Excel (or its clones) for data management. Maybe the fun stops there but it doesn’t have to.
Here are the two most important functions for getting the most out of working together with Org-Mode data tables and Excel (without having to use literate programming):
- Do your work in Excel
- Export it to a tab separated (TSV) file
- Import that into Org with
org-table-import - Do you work
- Work with it manually
- Do simple sorting with
org-table-sort-lines - Handle copy pasted tabular data from wherever with
org-table-convert-region
- Export that back to a Excel TSV with
org-table-export
It might seem pretty simple but this is a great foot in the door to start integrating Org-Mode into your data workflow.