The
outline structure of Org-mode documents lends itself to an
inheritance model of properties: if the parent in a tree has a
certain property, the children can inherit this property.
Org-mode does not turn this on by default, because it can slow
down property searches significantly and is often not needed.
However, if you find inheritance useful, you can turn it on by
setting the variable org-use-property-inheritance.
It may be set to t to make all properties inherited
from the parent, to a list of properties that should be
inherited, or to a regular expression that matches inherited
properties. If a property has the value ‘nil’, this is interpreted as an
explicit undefine of the property, so that inheritance search
will stop at this value and return nil.
Org-mode has a few properties for which inheritance is hard-coded, at least for the special applications for which they are used:
COLUMNS:COLUMNS: property defines the format of
column view (see Column
view). It is inherited in the sense that the level where a
:COLUMNS: property is defined is used as the
starting point for a column view table, independently of the
location in the subtree from where columns view is turned
on.CATEGORY:CATEGORY: property applies
to the entire subtree.ARCHIVE:ARCHIVE: property may define the archive location
for the entire subtree (see Moving
subtrees).LOGGING