Comment by afroisalreadyin
1 day ago
I've started using org-mode couple of years ago, and write documents using the basic features like headers and formatting, links between docs, and code sections, but still haven't figured out which power features are the ones worth investing time into, and would be the most useful. Which further features would you recommend digging into, based on your experience?
I suspect this is an issue for most org-mode users, we all use different things.
I have two real uses for org-mode; I write a "work log", or "diary", every day I'm at work which keeps track of meetings, tickets/issues I work on, pull-requests I review, etc.
Unrelated to that I have a property I rent out, and I keep a table for each year showing rent-received from my tenant. I have a little "database" of previous tenants, and their details.
When I add a new table row for this year, say "January 2026 | Sharon | €1000", that updates the global profit/loss table for the document as well as profit/loss for the current year AND a t able which just lists the tenants I've known, how much they paid, and how many months they rented for.
Both of these two use-cases use very different things. The diary is just a text-block as template, the financial stuff uses multiple tables, custom elisp code, and some summing operations.
I consider myself little above basics even after all this time. The features I use depend on what I'm doing at the time, and so I take a JIT approach to learning org-mode. I'd say just keep the main resources close by as they're very detailed, and search them whenever you're thinking of doing X thing.
A lot of the features in org simply aren't adding a ton of utility, IMHO.
If you need to represent tabular data, possibly with rudimentary calucations, in plain text then it's great.
For anything more complex it's best to just reach for Excel.