Org-Mode's Two Most Useful Data Table Functions That You Probably Never Used

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.

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