3.3 Column Groups

When Org exports tables, it does so by default without vertical lines because that is visually more satisfying in general. Occasionally however, vertical lines can be useful to structure a table into groups of columns, much like horizontal lines can do for groups of rows. In order to specify column groups, you can use a special row where the first field contains only ‘/’. The further fields can either contain ‘<’ to indicate that this column should start a group, ‘>’ to indicate the end of a column, or ‘<>’ (no space between ‘<’ and ‘>’) to make a column a group of its own. Upon export, boundaries between column groups are marked with vertical lines. Here is an example:

| N | N^2 | N^3 | N^4 | sqrt(n) | sqrt[4](N) |
|---+-----+-----+-----+---------+------------|
| / |  <  |     |  >  |       < |          > |
| 1 |  1  |  1  |  1  |       1 |          1 |
| 2 |  4  |  8  | 16  |  1.4142 |     1.1892 |
| 3 |  9  | 27  | 81  |  1.7321 |     1.3161 |
|---+-----+-----+-----+---------+------------|
#+TBLFM: $2=$1^2::$3=$1^3::$4=$1^4::$5=sqrt($1)::$6=sqrt(sqrt(($1)))

It is also sufficient to just insert the column group starters after every vertical line you would like to have:

| N | N^2 | N^3 | N^4 | sqrt(n) | sqrt[4](N) |
|---+-----+-----+-----+---------+------------|
| / | <   |     |     | <       |            |