Latest update on June 19, 2012 at 07:07 AM by aakai1056 .
Issue
I have a dataset that looks something like this:
Plot Species Cover 1 A 1 1 B 2 1 C 1 2 C 4 2 D 5 3 A 6 3 B 6 3 C 2 3 D 1 3 E 3
With over 300 plots, over 150 species and 6 covers.
I would like to rearrange the data to look like this:
A B C D E 1 1 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 5 0 3 6 6 2 1 3
With species as columns, plots as rows and covers as values.
No species occurs more than once I a single plot and not all plots have the same number of species.
I have several datasets like this, so doing it manually for all datasets would be quite tedious. This seems like it would be a common issue, but I haven't been able to find an answer. I thought pivot tables would work, but there is no way to insert raw values into the table (is there?), just descriptive statistics about the values. I've tried nested lookup's, if's, etc.
It isn't necessary that the data stay in excel, so if there is another program/ programming language that would do this task, I'd be willing to try that. Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
Solution
Find out unique values of plots and species by using advance filter see help undergetting unique values under Excel.
in your case the unique plots are 1 2 3 and unique species are A B C D E
below the data choose a cell e.g. A13 onwards down and to right as follows
Plot A B C D E 1 2 3
in B14 copy this formula
=IF(ISNA(INDEX($C$2:$C$11,MATCH(1,($A$2:$A$11=$A14)*($B$2:$B-$11=B$13),0),1)),0,INDEX($C$2:$C$11,MATCH(1,($A$2:$A$11=$A14 )*($B$2:$B$11=B$13),0),1))
invoke this formla with CONTROL+SHIFT+ENTER
copy B14 down and to the right
you get this result from A13 down and right=A13 will be blank )
A B C D E 1 1 2 1 0 0 2 0 0 4 5 0 3 6 6 2 1 3
BY THE BY 1C is 1 and not 0
Note
Thanks to venkat1926 for this tip on the forum.
Leave a Comment