How do you decide how your data should be arranged in terms of rows and columns? And what to do when you need to put a column of data in a row — or vice versa.
It is normally fairly obvious which way your data should be tabulated. If you have a list of learners and their assessment marks for the year, you enter the data so that each learner has a row of marks arranged in columns for each assessment. This arrangement is almost automatic. If it is not immediately obvious, how should we make the decision?
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Well, in the above example, we have more learners than assessments, so it makes sense to arrange the data that way.
To approach it another way, we would decide what the main object was that we were dealing with, and which were the set of values attributed to each of those objects. If we think in terms of database design then, it is obvious that each learner should be a record in the table with “fields” as such to capture the results for each assessment.
In the example below we have a set of “modem” devices and the speeds at which they are capable of transmitting and receiving data:
By selecting the range A1:H2 and copying it, we can then select a destination cell and right-click paste the data using the Transpose option:
The end result after deleting the old data:
