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Glossary

Pivot

Reshaping a table by turning the values of one column into new column headers, for example one row per store per month into one row per store with a column for each month.

The reverse operation, turning column headers back into rows, is called unpivoting or melting. The word also describes a spreadsheet pivot table, which summarizes the data as it reshapes it.

Where it comes up

  • Wide tables that should be longValues of one variable, such as months or years, are spread across the column headers instead of being stored in a column of their own.

See also

  • Wide formatA table layout in which repeated measurements of the same thing are spread across columns: one row per store, with a separate sales column for each month.
  • Long formatA table layout with one row per observation, in which a repeated measurement gets a row each time: one row for each store in each month.
  • Tidy dataA table layout in which each row is one observation, each column is one variable, and each cell holds one value.

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