Stacking and Unstacking Data

A common issue in data science is that we receive data in long form but need it in tabular form, or vice versa. Because we’re working in the tidyverse, we always want our data to be tidy. But that isn’t always how the data is stored. Humans read tabular data more easily, while long-format data is often more efficiently stored in databases. So, depending on where our data is coming from and who’s using it most often, there will come times when we need to make our data longer, i.e., fewer columns but more rows, or more tabular, i.e., fewer rows but more columns.