Getting ready

We will use the senators data from the previous recipe. This can be found from the following location:

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/data.collections/datalibrary/data.set6.html

The Getting ready section of the Stacking blocks of columns at the same time recipe has details on how to import the data.

How to do it…

The following instructions will stack the party membership details and retain information about the state at the same time:

How it works…

The stack blocks of columns commands will stack columns vertically by order in each row. The number of senators for Democrats will be placed in the second column at the top, those for Republicans will placed below it, and finally, the Independent senators will appear. The State column is placed in each row to ensure that the stacked data has the correct state next to each count of senators in the second column.

The optional selection of Use variable names in subscript column uses the name of the first column in each row to identify where the data has come from in the new worksheet and places this in the first column. Hence, in the stacked worksheet, column 1 lists Democrats, then Republicans, and finally, Independents.

The preceding screenshot shows the worksheet generated up to step 5 in the instructions. The column names are stored in the subscript column, C1. If we do not want the name of the parties to appear in column 1, then unselecting this option will create the subscript column with numbers instead.

As the stack commands do not name the columns, we should use step 6 to ensure that we can identify each column when we use these later in dialogs.

See also