Jeff Horn seems to be explaining specifics of how to do some nitty-gritty
manipulations--he mentions (quoting the manual) methods for yanking, Ccxy

The methods Jeff expressed are useful for the question posed.

I recommend rectangle-kill and rectangle-yank--Cxrk and Cxry to solve this
(in a very simple albeit possibly faster or slower way--depending on how
many columns you want to move/sort---moving column/rectangle 3 to the 3rd
position in this case--took a few seconds)

I tested Juan's method/defun---works grrrrreat!!
Thanks Juan

P.S. I did lose the hlines like you reported; but, to put the line back was
3 key strokes: |-Tab

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Juan Pechiar <juan@pechiar.com> wrote:

> If you don't mind losing h-lines, you can transpose the table, sort
> rows, and transpose back.
>
> This code (which I previously posted to the list) transposes a table:
>
> #+begin_src: emacs-lisp
>
> (defun org-transpose-table-at-point ()
>  "Transpose orgmode table at point, eliminate hlines"
>  (interactive)
>  (let ((contents (apply #'mapcar* #'list
>                         (remove-if-not 'listp  ;; remove 'hline from list
>                                        (org-table-to-lisp))))  ;; signals
> error if not table
>        )
>    (delete-region (org-table-begin) (org-table-end))
>    (insert (mapconcat (lambda(x) (concat "| " (mapconcat 'identity x " | "
> ) "  |\n" ))
>                       contents
>                       ""))
>    (org-table-align)
>    )
> )
>
> #+end_src
>
> Regards,
> .j.
>
> On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 02:42:55PM +0100, Gary wrote:
> > Is there any way to sort the columns of a table, such that for example
> >
> > | Col 3 | Col 1 | Col 2 |
> >
> > can be converted to
> >
> > | Col 1 | Col 2 | Col 3 |
> > |-------+-------+-------|
> > | ...   | ...   | ...   |
> >
> > ?
>
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