This is the official manual for the latest Org-mode release.
Since column view is just an overlay over a buffer, it cannot be
exported or printed directly. If you want to capture a column view, use
a columnview
dynamic block (see Dynamic blocks). The frame
of this block looks like this:
* The column view #+BEGIN: columnview :hlines 1 :id "label" #+END:
This dynamic block has the following parameters:
:id
local use the tree in which the capture block is located
global make a global view, including all headings in the file
"file:path-to-file"
run column view at the top of this file
"ID" call column view in the tree that has an :ID:
property with the value label. You can use
M-x org-id-copy RET to create a globally unique ID for
the current entry and copy it to the kill-ring.
:hlines
t
, insert an hline after every line. When a number N, insert
an hline before each headline with level <=
N.
:vlines
t
, force column groups to get vertical lines.
:maxlevel
:skip-empty-rows
t
, skip rows where the only non-empty specifier of the
column view is ITEM
.
The following commands insert or update the dynamic block:
org-insert-columns-dblock
)org-dblock-update
)#+BEGIN
line of the dynamic block.
org-update-all-dblocks
)You can add formulas to the column view table and you may add plotting
instructions in front of the table—these will survive an update of the
block. If there is a #+TBLFM:
after the table, the table will
actually be recalculated automatically after an update.
An alternative way to capture and process property values into a table is provided by Eric Schulte's org-collector.el which is a contributed package1. It provides a general API to collect properties from entries in a certain scope, and arbitrary Lisp expressions to process these values before inserting them into a table or a dynamic block.
[1] Contributed packages are not part of Emacs, but are distributed with the main distribution of Org (visit http://orgmode.org).