Hi again, I can confirm that behaviour for org-mode < 8.0 (tested on 7.9.3f) if that matter. Furtermore, I tested a lot of alternatives. "lastname, firstname" lastname, firstname lastname; firstname etc. It seems, they all get somehow evaluated by calc, which ends up in funny different results. I do not understand what was the intention of letting the code be parsed by calc but it seems to cause trouble. Will test to comment how to get around it Thanks Torsten On 15 July 2013 11:43, Torsten Wagner wrote: > 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 >> >> >> >