Hello Christian, thank you for your input. calc support for units indeed covers the basics of working with currencies. I gave it a spin on some notes I have been working on recently. While some things work very nicely, other are a bit ugly. It is a good start and I'll explore this approach more.
On 24/09/2020 11:17, Christian Moe wrote: > Now, with the Calc command to simplify units, you can add dollars to > euros and get the result in whichever currency comes first in the > algebraic expression > > | 3 USD | 4 EUR | 6.58 EUR | > #+tblfm: $3=usimplify($2+$1) > > | 3 USD | 4 EUR | 7.6511628 USD | > #+tblfm: $3=usimplify($1+$2) Having to explicitly use usimplify() is a bit too verbose. It would be ideal if this could be somehow be implicit. > I don't use this functionality, so I don't have answers to all the > questions you'll now have -- including how to get the desired precision > without lopping off the currency unit in the last example! Having the desired fixed precision is quite important for this to be useful. In y recent tests I had to drop the units (currencies) to achieve this. It would be nice to find a way to avoid it. > There are ways to enter user-defined units permanently. But exchange > rates change, so to use this functionality on a daily basis, you'll want > to have some kind of function to pull exchange rates and update the > currency unit definitions in the Calc init file. Computations usually refer to a specific point in time, thus this is npt a big problem in practice. I already have scripts to pull exchange rates at a given date. These can the be inserted as a property that can be easily references from the computations. > Apart from `usimplify', most Calc functions on units appear (?) to be > missing corresponding algebraic versions that you can use in Calc > expressions in Org tables, which limits the usefulness. > > Org tables don't seem to have any specific formula syntax for leveraging > Calc unit operations apart from what happens to work out of the > box. This might be an area for improvement, though I'm not sure what to > ask for. I don't understand what you mean in the two paragraphs above. Can you please clarify, maybe with examples? Thank you. Cheers, Dan
