Capturing column view
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’
This is the most important parameter. Column view is a feature that is often localized to a certain (sub)tree, and the capture block might be at a different location in the file. To identify the tree whose view to capture, you can use four values:
‘local’
Use the tree in which the capture block is located.
‘global’
Make a global view, including all headings in the file.
‘file:FILENAME’
Run column view at the top of the FILENAME file.
‘LABEL’
Call column view in the tree that has an ‘ID’ property with the value LABEL. You can use M-x org-id-copy to create a globally unique ID for the current entry and copy it to the kill-ring.
‘:match’
When set to a string, use this as a tags/property match filter to select only a subset of the headlines in the scope set by the :id parameter.
‘:hlines’
When t, insert an hline after every line. When a number N, insert an hline before each headline with level <= N.
‘:vlines’
When non-nil, force column groups to get vertical lines.
‘:maxlevel’
When set to a number, do not capture entries below this level.
‘:skip-empty-rows’
When non-nil, skip rows where the only non-empty specifier of the column view is ‘ITEM’.
‘:exclude-tags’
List of tags to exclude from column view table: entries with these tags will be excluded from the column view.
‘:indent’
When non-nil, indent each ‘ITEM’ field according to its level.
‘:link’
When non-nil, link the ‘ITEM’ headlines in the table to their origins.
‘:format’
Specify a column attribute (see Column attributes) for the dynamic block.
‘:formatter’
A function to format column view data and insert it into the buffer. See the option org-columns-dblock-formatter.
The following commands insert or update the dynamic block:
org-columns-insert-dblock
Insert a dynamic block capturing a column view. Prompt for the scope or ID of the view.
This command can be invoked by calling org-dynamic-block-insert-dblock (C-c C-x x) and selecting “columnview” (see Dynamic Blocks).
C-c C-c C-c C-x C-u (org-dblock-update)
Update dynamic block at point. Point needs to be on the ‘#+BEGIN’ line of the dynamic block.
C-u C-c C-x C-u (org-update-all-dblocks)
Update all dynamic blocks (see Dynamic Blocks). This is useful if you have several clock table blocks, column-capturing blocks or other dynamic blocks in a buffer.
You can add formulas to the column view table, and you may add plotting instructions in front of the table—these survive an update of the block. If there is a ‘TBLFM’ keyword after the table, the table is 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 package in ‘org-contrib’[1]. 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.
Contributed packages are not part of Emacs, but are distributed with the main distribution of Org—visit https://orgmode.org. ↩︎