Hi All This post started as a problem and question, but I found a solution. I thought I'd document my observations. Forgive me if it's obvious, but it wasn't to me! I had trouble with date arithmetic in an org table, I think because the function thought that inactive dates were vectors: | Date | Days before today | |------------------+---------------------------------------------------- ----| | <2008-03-22 Sat> | 38.540 | | [2008-03-22 Sat] | [<2002-11-24 Sun 12:57>, <2008-04-29 Tue 12:57> - Sat] | #+TBLFM: $2=now()-$1 I didn't want to use active dates, as I didn't want the heading to appear in the agenda. Starting to play around, I discovered that <[2008-03-22 Sat]> would work as an inactive date acceptable to the formula, but the trailing ">" was stripped when using keystrokes to adjust the date. So then I noticed that <[2008-03-22 Sat] would work still, and nothing was lost during adjustment. Which finally led to the discovery that [2008-03-22 Sat] also works if the formula is adjusted to #+TBLFM: $2=now()-<$1> Hope this helps others. -- Chris Randle Org-mode 6.02. Emacs 22.1.1. Windows XP.