Data isn't always given to us in the format that's most convenient for our analysis. Therefore, we need to be able to restructure data into both wide and long formats, depending on the analysis we want to perform. For many analyses, we will want wide format data so that we can look at the summary statistics easily and share our results in that format.
However, this isn't always as black and white as going from long format to wide format or vice versa. Consider the following data from the Exercises section:
| ticker | date | open | high | low | close | volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | AAPL | 2018-01-02 | 166.9271 | 169.0264 | 166.0442 | 168.9872 | 25555934 |
| 0 | AMZN | 2018-01-02 | 1172.0000 | 1190.0000 | 1170.5100 | 1189.0100 | 2694494 |
| 0 | FB | 2018-01-02 | 177.6800 | 181.5800 | 177.5500 | 181.4200 | 18151903 |
| 0 | GOOG | 2018-01-02 | 1048.3400 | 1066.9400 | 1045.2300 | 1065.0000 | 1237564 |
| 0 | NFLX | 2018-01-02 | 196.1000... |
