I’m training to ride RAGBRAI LIII in Iowa in July 2026. RAGBRAI provides a training plan which, if followed, helps riders get ready for the ride.

Being an Emacs Org geek, I grabbed the provided Excel spreadsheet, exported it as a CSV (comma separated values) file, then converted that to an Org table.

The spreadsheet shows two lines per week, one with the planned mileages, and another to record the actual miles ridden. There’s a total mileage in column 6, which is filled in for the planned rides, and you fill in yourself for the actuals.

The first few lines of the spreadsheet look like

|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
|                      | 2026 RAGBRAI® Training Plan |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Week of:             | Weekday 1                   | Weekday 2         | Saturday         | Sunday           | Week Total |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| February 9           | 5 miles                     | 5 miles           | 10 miles         | -                | 20 miles   |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Actual Ridden        |                             |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| February 16          | 10 miles                    | 10 miles          | 10 miles         | -                | 30 miles   |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|
| Actual Ridden        |                             |                   |                  |                  |            |
|----------------------+-----------------------------+-------------------+------------------+------------------+------------|

I wanted to do two things:

  • make column 6 the sum of columns 2 through 5, which include two weekday and two weekend rides
  • create a column 7 that’s a percentage of the actual vs. planned mileage

Org tables let you specify formulas for cells, columns, and rows. Getting the sum of columns 2 through 5 for column 6 can be done a couple of ways:

  • $6=$2+$3+$4+$5
  • $6=vsum($2..$5)

I used the former for quite a while, until I realized I could use the latter. Either way, it works.

I had difficulty getting the formula for column 7 working how I wanted it. Org tables can do formulas using Calc syntax, which is what I used for column 6, or using Emacs Lisp forms as formulas. I used Calc syntax to get this working. I wanted to calculate $7 as 100 times the value of @0$6, the current row’s sum of miles ridden, divided by the value of the previous row’s sum of planned miles. It’s easy enough to just do something like $7=100*@0$6/@-1$6, but the values on the planned rides rows were 100 times the planned miles for that week divided by the actual miles for the previous week, which is usually some number over 100. And not that interesting to me.

I also got rid of all instances of “miles” in the table. I ended up with weird things like 70.3 miles / miles, and couldn’t figure out how to get Org to simplify this. Getting rid of “miles” in the spreadsheet made things look much better.

I wanted to key on the “Actual Ridden” string in $1. If $1 is “Actual Ridden”, then use the calculation we’ve been discussing. Otherwise, use 100 or show nothing. I had great difficulty making this work with Calc syntax.

So, I tried Emacs Lisp forms as formulas. I ended up with

$7='(if (string-equal $1 "Actual Ridden") (format "%.2f" (* 100 (/ (string-to-number @0$6) (string-to-number @-1$6)))) "")

This is a pretty straightforward translation of the percentage formula, along with using format to only show a couple of decimal places. In the case of other lines, just return an empty string. The final formula works great.