10 Must-Know Tidyverse Functions: #3 - Pivot Wider and Longer

Written by Matt Dancho

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This article is part of a R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks.

Learn how to use pivot_wider() and pivot_longer() to format data like a data wizard:

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• YouTube Tutorial

Why Pivot Wider?

Pivoting wider is essential for making summary tables that go into reports & help humans (like you and me) understand key information.

Let’s say we have some automobile manufacturer data that we want to format into a table that people can read.

We can summarize and pivot the data by manufacturer and class to understand the number of vehicle classes that each manufacturer produces.

The result is a table that I can glean for insights.

Why Pivot Longer?

Pivot longer lengthens data, increasing the number of rows and decreasing the number of columns.

We can convert from wide to long with Pivot Longer, which gets it into the correct format to visualize with GGPLOT HEATMAP. 💥💥💥

That was ridiculously easy. Keep it up & you’ll become a tidyverse rockstar.

You Learned Something New!

Great! But, you need to learn a lot to become an R programming wizard.

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