[Feature Request]: Add feature to stack data

[TRob2525]

Description

Add a feature to stack data in the worksheet from multiple groups in separate columns to a two-column, data and group, format

Purpose

To make it simpler to use data that comes naturally in an unstacked format

Use-case

Much data comes to the user in an unstacked format. Currently, the user must manually stack the data in excel (it is very clunky to do in JASP) and then copy-paste into JASP

Is your feature request related to a problem?

It is related to an opportunity for improvment

Is your feature request related to a JASP module?

Other

Describe the solution you would like

Add a button to stack data that would bring up a GUI allowing the user to select the columns to be stacked. The titles of the columns would then become the labels for each group in the 2nd column of the stacked data

Describe alternatives that you have considered

Manually stacking in Excel

Additional context

No response

[EJWagenmakers]

Related to data wrangling and long vs wide format I think, @JorisGoosen

[tomtomme]

@TRob2525
Can you confirm that this is a duplicate of #33
Then we could close this issue.
It very much sounds to me like conversion from wide to long format.

[TRob2525]

Folks, So, it seems that #33 is about being able to do the analysis directly from the wide format as well as long format (which is the current condition in JASP). My request is to duplicate a transform function that Minitab has. It has "stack" and "unstack" menu options that brings up a gui where you can switch from wide to long or long to wide. My request is simply to have the feature in JASP where if I have data that comes to me in wide format, I can then transform it to long format for use in analysis. Currently, I have to do this manually in Excel which is fine if the dataset is small but quite tedious if the dataset is large. Regards, Tom Roberts Director of Quality HEXPOL Compounding Americas

[JorisGoosen]

Hey Tom,

So the issue at #33 is one I really hope to get to some day soon.
But basically right now most analyses in JASP are all written for wide format.
We have an analysis ANOVA RM that does actually work internally with a long format and starts with an interface to define this transformation. It sounds rather similar to the (un)stack thing from Minitab.

There might also be some Quality Control analyses that do this, although it sounds like they simply read the data as is and treat it as long regardless.

The idea I have for #33 would be to basically allow JASP to store one or more transformations into long from wide.
So internally we would still store the data in a wide format (for technical reasons).
But whenever someone would read a long-dataset we would allow a user to define a conversion into wide or vice versa.

The data can then be made available to the analyses that require long input as long and as wide for those that expect wide. This would be rather nice because it would avoid users having to switch to Excel or some other application to convert from wide<->long but just allow users to do this in JASP.

All in all I do think this is a duplicate of 33, which I will hopefully get to soon.
The rewriting of the data-backend has mostly been done by now and was a necessary precondition to start on that issue.

Maybe the minitab interface was good though?
Because in that case I could perhaps get some inspiration from there for setting up the GUI.

[TRob2525]

OK. Thank you. Regards, Tom Roberts Director of Quality HEXPOL Compounding Americas

[EJWagenmakers]

@JTPetter has a Minitab license I think; maybe he could give you a demo, @JorisGoosen, of how the unstacking works.

[JorisGoosen]

Good one EJ