Here is an example how easy it is to use cdata
to re-layout your data.
Tim Morris recently tweeted the following problem (corrected).
Please will you take pity on me #rstats folks? I only want to reshape two variables x & y from wide to long! Starting with: d xa xb ya yb 1 1 3 6 8 2 2 4 7 9 How can I get to: id t x y 1 a 1 6 1 b 3 8 2 a 2 7 2 b 4 9 In Stata it's: . reshape long x y, i(id) j(t) string In R, it's: . an hour of cursing followed by a desperate tweet 👆 Thanks for any help! PS – I can make reshape() or gather() work when I have just x or just y.
This is not to make fun of Tim Morris: the above should be easy. Using diagrams and slowing down the data transform into small steps makes the process very easy.