Re: org-table-copy-down feature request

[Bastien <bzg@gnu.org>]

Hi Marcin,

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> at present, the only reasonable values of org-table-copy-increment are
> nil or non-nil.  How about enabling to use it as an increment value?
> This would be very useful in the following case: I want to make a table
> with dates for subsequent classes (and table is better than headlines
> for me, since for each class I put - among others - the number of
> problems solved during that class, so that I can use the spreadsheet to
> compute the total and average-per-hour numbers; useful for planning for
> the remainder of the semester;)).  It would be great to set
> org-table-copy-increment to 7 so that I get timestamps increased by one
> week.

What about accepting an Org formula as the "increment" value?

> Another change which would help me might be to have a special value like
> 'arithmetic, so that the increment could be computed from /this and
> previous/ entries. (This might be even better, mimicking
> Excel's/LibreOffice's functionality, which is a bit broken in those
> applications, since it seems to require a mouse, but is very useful
> nonetheless.)

Yes -- the formula would make this possible too.

> Another, related problem I have with org-table-copy-down is that it
> overwrites rows.  It might be better for it to insert a new row /if/
> the entry in the next row is nonempty.

The default behavior seems TRT here, but an option could refine it.

> What do you think?

Thanks for raising this,

-- 
 Bastien