Re: Wishlist: allow range of table elements to be filled by sbe

["András Major" <andras.g.major@gmail.com>]

Hi Eric,

> sbe is just an elisp function which is called by the Org-mode
> spreadsheet's function evaluation mechanisms.  The spreadsheet does not
> allow for insertion of results into multiple cells and thus neither does
> the use of sbe.

Hmmm.  It appears that one can make sbe set multiple cells in the
table -- simply make your code block output multiple results separated
by "|" and set ":results table".  This, however, also shifts any
existing cells in the table, thus increasing the number of columns,
instead of just overwriting the given number of cells.

> I would recommend a solution like the following, which
> reads the /entire/ table into a code block, and writes the results out
> in place.

This isn't always practical.  In the case of the Org document I'm
writing at the moment, the computation is rather expensive, and my
goal is that you can edit a row in the table and run the calculation
just for that row to see the result.  Updating the entire table at
once would be much too slow.

> Every time the code block is evaluated multiple cells in the table are
> changed.  To only set specific table values use of the `setf' macro
> would probably be more appropriate.

How is setf used?  I haven't found it in the documentation.

  András