Org mode spreadsheet programmatic remote references - emacs

Question

I keep my budget in org-mode and have been pleased with how simple it is. The simplicity fails, however, as I am performing formulas on many cells; for instance, my year summary table that performs the same grab-and-calculate formulas for each month. I end up with a massive line in my +TBLFM. This would be dramatically shorter if I could programmatically pass arguments to the formula. I'm looking for something like this, but working:
| SEPT |
| #ERROR |
#+TBLFM: #2$1=remote(#1,$tf)
Elsewhere I have a table named SEPT and it has field named "tf". This function works if I replace "#1" with "SEPT" but this would cause me to need a new entry in the formula for every column.
Is there a way to get this working, where the table itself can specify what remote table to call (such as the SEPT in my example)?

Answer 1

Yes, you can't do this with built-in remote and you need to use org-table-get-remote-range. Hopefully this better suits your needs than the answer given by artscan (I used his/her example):
| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
| 1 | 2 |
#+TBLFM: #2='(org-table-get-remote-range #<$0 (string ?# ?1 ?$ ?1))
#+TBLNAME: testname1
| 1 |
#+TBLNAME: testname2
| 2 |
Note the (string ?# ?1 ?$ ?1): this is necessary because before evaluating table formulae, all substitutions will be done first. If you use "#1$1" directly, it would have triggered the substitution mechanism and be substituted by the contents of the first cell in this table.

Answer 2

There is some ugly hack for same effect without using remote:
1) it needs named variable for remote address
(setq eab/test-remote "#1$1")
2) it uses elisp expression (from org-table.el) instead remote(tablename,#1$1)
(defun eab/test-remote (x)
`(car (read
(org-table-make-reference
(org-table-get-remote-range ,x eab/test-remote)
't 't nil))))
3) worked example
| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
| | |
#+TBLFM: #2='(eval (eab/test-remote #1))
#+TBLNAME: testname1
| 1 |
#+TBLNAME: testname2
| 2 |
4) result
| testname1 | testname2 |
|-----------+-----------|
| 1 | 2 |