[R] help with data layout

[Mike Lawrence]

Nice tip on filling missing col1 values. I've always just done the  
filling in excel by hand. I then use that same hand to smack the  
person that gave me data in excel format :Op

On 17-Jul-08, at 1:19 PM, Erik Iverson wrote:

> Iain Gallagher wrote:
>> Hello list
>> I have been given some Excel sheets with data laid like this:
>> Col1    Col2 A         3 2 3 B         4 5 4 C         1 4 3
>> I was hoping to import this into R as a csv and then get the mean and
>> SD for each letter in column 1.
>> Could someone give me some guidance on best to approach this?
>
> Sure.  Reading in Excel sheets can be done at least a few ways, see  
> the R Data Import/Export manual on CRAN.  The only way I have done  
> it is to save the Excel sheet as a CSV file, and then use read.csv  
> in R to get a data.frame.  One note here is that sometimes the Excel  
> sheet has 'missing' cells where someone has inserted blanks.  These  
> may get written out to the CSV file, you'll have to check.  For  
> example, I've seen an Excel sheet with something like 10 rows of  
> data that outputs about 100 to the CSV file, mostly all missing.
>
> Anyway, once you have the data.frame, I'd use na.locf from the zoo  
> package to 'fill' in the missing Col1 values, and then use an R  
> function such as ave, tapply, aggregate, or by to do whatever you'd  
> like.
>
>
>> Thanks
>> Iain
>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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--
Mike Lawrence
Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University

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