Org mode spreadsheet programmatic remote references

Question

I keep my budget in org-mode and have been pleased with how simple it is. The simplicity fails, however, as I am performing formulas on many cells; for instance, my year summary table that performs the same grab-and-calculate formulas for each month. I end up with a massive line in my +TBLFM. This would be dramatically shorter if I could programmatically pass arguments to the formula. I'm looking for something like this, but working:

| SEPT   |
| #ERROR |
#+TBLFM: @2$1=remote(@1,$tf)

Elsewhere I have a table named SEPT and it has field named "tf". This function works if I replace "@1" with "SEPT" but this would cause me to need a new entry in the formula for every column.

Is there a way to get this working, where the table itself can specify what remote table to call (such as the SEPT in my example)?

Answer 1

Yes, you can't do this with built-in remote and you need to use org-table-get-remote-range. Hopefully this better suits your needs than the answer given by artscan (I used his/her example):

| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
|         1 |         2 |
#+TBLFM: @2='(org-table-get-remote-range @<$0 (string ?@ ?1 ?$ ?1))

#+TBLNAME: testname1
|    1 |

#+TBLNAME: testname2
|    2 |

Note the (string ?@ ?1 ?$ ?1): this is necessary because before evaluating table formulae, all substitutions will be done first. If you use "@1$1" directly, it would have triggered the substitution mechanism and be substituted by the contents of the first cell in this table.

Answer 2

There is some ugly hack for same effect without using remote:

1) it needs named variable for remote address

(setq eab/test-remote "@1$1")

2) it uses elisp expression (from org-table.el) instead remote(tablename,@1$1)

(defun eab/test-remote (x)
  `(car (read
     (org-table-make-reference
      (org-table-get-remote-range ,x eab/test-remote)
      't 't nil))))

3) worked example

| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
|           |           |
#+TBLFM: @2='(eval (eab/test-remote @1))

#+TBLNAME: testname1
|    1 |

#+TBLNAME: testname2
|    2 |

4) result

| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
|         1 |         2 |