This table format is called the long format , or narrow format, or tall format, or stacked data, or tidy data. (The two tables on the right are the same, just with switched columns and rows.) All three tables show exactly the same information:įun fact: The table on the left is pretty long. Let’s add some colors, to see the difference in these tables better. Ugh, that’s not ideal, is it? What we actually need to create a line chart in Datawrapper (and many other charting tools) is this table format: The difference between long and wide formatĮvery time we download something from the World Bank, Our World in Data and some other sources, it comes in this format: To play around with this chart, hover over it and click on “Edit this chart” in its top right corner.
You can create charts like the one below for free at. We will use pivot tables to create the following Datawrapper chart out of data that I found at Our World in Data.
And that’s what I’ll explain in this article. īesides doing all the summarising, pivot tables are excellent to get your data from the long format into a wide format. For example, if your original table has the salary of each person in each country, you could use a pivot table to calculate the average salary in each country (the country is your group). You can calculate averages, counts, max/min values or sums for numbers in a group. that you can create to summarize data from your original table. Pivot tables are tables in your Excel/Google Sheets/LibreOffice etc. This article is written for people with very little experience in working with data.