A tidy table gives every observation its own row and every variable its own column. For a fruit-tasting dataset, each row can represent one piece of fruit, with columns for ID, date, fruit type, and taste score. section 8.3.1
Use a tidy table when shaping data for visual analysis:
- Keep data less aggregated when possible: you can summarize detailed rows later, but aggregation cannot recover discarded information. section 8.3.1
- Connect a wide tidy table directly to Tableau or Power BI when flexible aggregation suits the design. section 8.3.1
- Use tidy-table libraries such as Pandas for Python, or comparable tools in R and d3; otherwise, aggregate first when the code requires it. section 8.3.1
Table 8.3 An example of a tidy table, with a grain of one row per individual fruit eaten (observation) and one column per measure (variable) (view table figure)
Inspect a compact tidy-table example showing one observation per row and one measure per column. section 8.3.1
