Wide and narrow data

Wide and narrow (sometimes un-stacked and stacked) are terms used to describe two different presentations for tabular data.

Wide

Wide, or unstacked data is presented with each different data variable in a separate column.

Person	Age	Weight
Bob	32	128
Alice	24	86
Steve	64	95

Narrow

See also: Entity–attribute–value model

Narrow, or stacked data is presented with one column containing all the values and another column listing the context of the value

Person	Variable	Value
Bob	Age	32
Bob	Weight	128
Alice	Age	24
Alice	Weight	86
Steve	Age	64
Steve	Weight	95

This is often easier to implement, addition of a new field does not require any changes to the structure of the table, however it can be harder for people to understand.

Implementations

Many statistical and data processing systems have functions to convert between these two presentations, for instance the R programming language has several packages such as the reshape package

See also

• Abstract data type
• Table (information)
• Information graphics
• Row (database)
• Table (database)
• Table (HTML)

External links

• http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/reshape