Hi Nick, very good observation. Just wonder are we the first who observe this problem?! It seems org-table-make-reference and calc-eval have some sort of an different idea of the data content. Yes calc use that notation to deal with imaginary numbers. Funny coincidence, the students in that list just struggle with exactly those imaginary numbers and now there names became a imaginary number itself... ;) Thanks for the tip, I will see if some search and replace helps me to create a intermediate solution. Thanks Torsten On 14 July 2013 05:29, Nick Dokos wrote: > Torsten Wagner writes: > > > I just notice a strange behaviour within tables. I want to copy a > > column of one table into another... using $1=remote(prf94120_orig, > > @@#$6). The original content consist of names in the form > > "lastname,firstnames". However, executing the above formular I receive > > "lastname + firstnames i" > > > > I have totally no clue what is the reason for that.... a bug?! > > Happens within Org-mode version 8.0.3 > > > > I tried it (on a single table too - no remote) and I get the same > behavior. I can't pretend to understand how anything in org-table.el > works, but I think this is a clue: on line 2678, > org-table-make-reference is called. If I call it by hand like this > > (org-table-make-reference "a, b" nil nil nil) --> "(a, b)" > > Then on line 2706, calc-eval is called. If I call it by hand on the > value above > > (calc-eval "(a, b)") --> "a + b i" > > I think it's trying to do arithmetic on complex numbers... > -- > Nick > > >