Re: [O] What to use for tables with lengthy text in cells?

[Tory S. Anderson]

It's not a perfect solution (many of us have wished for some way of doing 
multi-line cells in orgmode, but there's no clear solution...) but I use a 
combination of width restraints[1] and toggle-truncate-lines, which I've bound 
to <F5>. If it comes to the worst, I would probably pull out csv-mode and use a 
CSV file. I think the problem is that there's no simple way to wrap within just 
a cell in Emacs. 

"Charles C. Berry" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, 2 Mar 2015, Charles C. Berry wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2 Mar 2015, Matt Price wrote:
>>
>>> I have a project which will require me to enter about a paragraph in each
>>> of 5 fields several times a day. I would use org tables, but I need to be
>>> able to see the table contents in the buffer, and org hides long lines. I
>>> tried using table.el but it feels incredibly clumsy - for instance, I can't
>>> find a way to add a row to the end of the table, which seems crazy.
>>> 
>>> I am wondering  what other people do in this situation - I guess I could
>>> use a spreadsheet or an odt document but I would much rather stay in emacs
>>> if I can.
>>
>> I sometimes use babel blocks for this purpose.
>>
>
> But I did not give an example of filling in a table using that
> strategy.
>
> So here is an example of how you would use that strategy to fill out a
> table with fields that get edited. Obviously, you can use the string
> resulting from org-fill-template in other ways than in the example
> below.
>
>
> * Not exported                                                           
> :noexport:
>
> Define a table template (and put it out of the way in a subtree that
> is not exported)
>
> #+name: tmplt
> #+BEGIN_SRC org
>    | Never change me | %a                    |
>    | %b              | Dont modify me either |
> #+END_SRC
>
> Define the fill-in cells and be sure they are not exported:
>
> #+name: pcta
> #+BEGIN_SRC org
> this is ~a~.
> #+END_SRC
>
> #+name: pctb
> #+BEGIN_SRC org
> this is *b*.
> #+END_SRC
>
>
> * This gets exported
>
> #+HEADER: :var a=pcta() :var b=pctb() :var tm=tmplt() 
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :wrap latex :exports results
>    (org-export-string-as
>     (org-fill-template tm `(("a" . ,a)("b" . ,b)))
>     'latex t)
> #+END_SRC
>
> #+RESULTS:
> #+BEGIN_latex
> \begin{center}
> \begin{tabular}{ll}
> Never change me & this is \verb~a~.\\
> this is \textbf{b}. & Dont modify me either\\
> \end{tabular}
> \end{center}
> #+END_latex
>
> HTH,
>
> Chuck

Footnotes: 
[1]  
http://orgmode.org/manual/Column-width-and-alignment.html#Column-width-and-alignment