Converting long to wide data in R

1. Unite the Condition and Angle columns

To convert our long format data to the original wide format data frame, we will need to chain a series of commands in the reverse order. Recall that our original wide data frame started out with columns that had the Condition and Angle together and that we had to separate those two variables. We will do the reverse here with the unite() function. We will merge the Condition and Angle column data into one column called Condition.Angle.

wide.data <- 
  long.data %>%
  unite(Condition.Angle, Condition, Angle, sep = "")

2. Pivot the data

Next, we will use the pivot_wider() function to arrange the values from the Reaction_Time column into separate columns names by the variables in the Condition.Angle columns.

wide.data <- 
  long.data %>%
  unite(Condition.Angle, Condition, Angle, sep = "") %>%
  pivot_wider(names_from = Condition.Angle, values_from = Reaction_Time)

3. Remove the id column

Finally, I then selected all columns except id to end up with our original data frame.

wide.data <- 
  long.data %>%
  unite(Condition.Angle, Condition, Angle, sep = "") %>%
  pivot_wider(names_from = Condition.Angle, values_from = Reaction_Time) %>%
  select(-id)

References