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Is it possible to feed data from an org table into calc as a matrix, and then get it out again as a vector to fill in a column?

For example, if I have:

|           | Fund A | Fund B | Fund C | Combined |
| US        |     .1 |     .8 |     .5 |          |
| Europe    |     .2 |     .1 |     .4 |          |
| Pacific   |     .7 |     .1 |     .1 |          |
| Weighting |     .3 |     .5 |     .2 |          |

I would like to use a calc formula to matrix-multiply the data from the first three rows of numbers by the (transposed) weighting in the last row of numbers, and insert the result in the final column, like this:

|           | Fund A | Fund B | Fund C | Combined |
| US        |     .1 |     .8 |     .5 |      .53 |
| Europe    |     .2 |     .1 |     .4 |      .19 |
| Pacific   |     .7 |     .1 |     .1 |      .28 |
| Weighting |     .3 |     .5 |     .2 |          |

I was hoping maybe something like this would achieve that if inserted in the top cell of the last column -- but this is incorrect: no output is produced in the table:

=($2@2..$2@4) * trn($4@2..$4..@4)

If it's not possible using calc, is it possible using elisp?

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The following works for me:

|           | Fund A | Fund B | Fund C | Combined |
|-----------+--------+--------+--------+----------|
| US        |     .1 |     .8 |     .5 |     0.53 |
| Europe    |     .2 |     .1 |     .4 |     0.19 |
| Pacific   |     .7 |     .1 |     .1 |     0.28 |
| Weighting |     .3 |     .5 |     .2 |          |
#+TBLFM: @2$>..@>>$> = ($2..$>> * trn(@>$2..@>$>>))_1

In words: set the last column of rows 2 through one before the last row equal to the first element of the vector (_1) that is the product of that row vector ($2..$>> i.e. cols 2 through one before the last column) with the transpose of the row vector in the last row and the same columns (@>$2..@>$>>).

The matrix product is a 1x1 matrix but calc interprets it as a vector: I first tried extracting the element using both row and column (_1_1) but the second _1 went unused, so I just deleted it.

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  • Surely the matrix product is 4 x 1, not 1 x 1? Is three some way to visualise the result of the calc expression before it gets substituted back into the org table?
    – Croad Langshan
    Dec 2, 2019 at 23:14
  • It's not done all at once: it's done row by row, so it's the product of a 1x3 row vector (say the US one) and the transpose of another 1x3 row vector (the weights), so the result is indeed 1x1. You can turn on formula debugging (C-c {) and watch it step by step.
    – NickD
    Dec 3, 2019 at 2:44

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