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[[!meta title="Who needs Excel? Managing your students qualifications with org-table"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2023 Daniel Molina"]]
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# Who needs Excel? Managing your students qualifications with org-table
Daniel Molina (he/him) - website: <https://www.danimolina.net> Mastodon: @dmolina@fosstodon.org, <mailto:dmolina@mailbox.org>
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In this talk I will explain how to use org-table to review and calculate the qualifications of the students (but the used techniques are general). I will show how to use several tables, one for each partial exam, using weights for create the final table. I also use summarize table with org-aggregate for a general view of results, and export the qualification to PDF. All the process with Emacs!
I’ll demonstrate some functionality I use for:
- Formula for calculate the qualification using weights, that can be easily updated.
- Summarize tables with org-aggregate (<https://github.com/tbanel/orgaggregate>).
- Create a final table making reference to tables in different files.
For several years, I have been using that workflow, and I consider it is very natural with many advantages, like writing the reasons/feedback in the same file with the qualifications, or to be able to use a version control.
About the speaker:
My name is Daniel Molina Cabrera, I am a senior lecturer in Computer
Science at the University of Granada, in Spain. I use only Linux in my
computer, and after been using Vim many years, last years I mainly use
Emacs for editing, as file manager, as email program, ...
In my experience, using org-table is very powerful and useful, but
many interesting features are not well-known. Unfortunately, sometimes
it is difficult to see examples showing the possibilities, and I think
this example could be very informative.
# Discussion
## Notes
- Very impressive on your skill over the org-table
- Thank you for your opinion.
- Never use aggregate function before, will have a try.
- Yes, you should, it is clearly a nice package and very useful. Also,
it is very well documented at its page:
<https://github.com/emacsmirror/orgtbl-aggregate>
- org table is awesome, but it lacks the fold, if i don't missing something. long table is bad to view
- You can put the table under a heading, and you will be able to fold it.
- very true. Long tables also have performance issues unfortunately. (IME) but still invaluable for any form of data analysis. I've not used the aggregate package used in this talk: must have a look. Don't get me wrong: I will put up with the performance hit of long tables well before I would ever consider one of those other tools!
- any block can be folded by pressing TAB on its header line
- I have manage about 200+ students evaluations with multiple columns (20+) in a single org file. It is not fast, but I can't say it is worst than using Excell (or even LibreOffice's Calc). I have separate my students in multiple tables, according to their groups, and that helps.
- Got an answer on mastodon concerning org tables and formulas: "The documentation is not ideal", which is a little sad.
- sadly, that's true. Much experimentation is needed.
- I find the documentation for org tables quite good. It does help if you know Calc as well, however. But, of course, updates to the documentation are always welcome...
- This talk was really good in showing how to actually make some things though. Going to look up the aggregate package.
## Questions and answers
- Q: Why we splitter the table like this, instead of using a giant
master table?
- A: Actually, some of the tables are only for me, and other are
published. This is the main reason to have several tables.
- Q: Do you have some kind of school administrative system you have to
enter the grades into in addition, or is this how you present the
grades to the students? Do you use it for your own records only?
- A: Well, I use the final table (and for each practique) and
export it to PDF to put the qualifications, it is not only for
my own records. Also, there is a school administrative system
that I need to use to publish the final score. In order to make
easier to me, I export in the same order and then with the
browser I put the qualifications. It is suppose to import from
csv (and I could export from my org-table) for it is not always
working nicely, it is a pity, because in that case, I could
automatically put the qualifications.
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