org spreadsheet and collapsing columns

Question

I have a long spreadsheet 30 rows and 60 columns . It is difficult to work on columns as I can not freeze the columns. Is it possible to collapse the columns ?

Answer 1

I'm not sure whether the following will help in your case, but I hope it will be of some use (and it may be useful to others).

You can control the width of a column with cookies. The Tables/Column width and alignment section of the manual describes this as follows (and contains additional useful information):

Sometimes a single field or a few fields need to carry more text,
leading to inconveniently wide columns.  Maybe you want to hide away
several columns or display them with a fixed width, regardless of
content, as shown in the following example.

    |---+---------------------+--------|           |---+-------...|...|
    |   | <6>                 |        |           |   | <6>   ...|...|
    | 1 | one                 | some   |   ----\   | 1 | one   ...|...|
    | 2 | two                 | boring |   ----/   | 2 | two   ...|...|
    | 3 | This is a long text | column |           | 3 | This i...|...|
    |---+---------------------+--------|           |---+-------...|...|

To set the width of a column, one field anywhere in the column may
contain just the string `<N>` where ‘N’ specifies the width as a number
of characters.

Also, there is a new dynamic column shrinking feature in recent upstream org-mode. It is described thus in the ORG-NEWS file:

*** Dynamically narrow table columns
    
With `C-c TAB`, it is now possible to narrow a column to the width
specified by a width cookie in the column, or to 1 character if there
is no such cookie.  The same keybinding expands a narrowed column to
its previous state.

Editing the column automatically expands the whole column to its full
size.