4 Introduction

The idea of tidy data is central to the tidyverse. If you’re not already familiar with the features of tidy data, we recommend the following sections from Chapter 12 of R for Data Science:

• 12.1: Introduction
• 12.2: Tidy Data

Most of the data you’ll encounter won’t be tidy. In this section, we’ll introduce some key tools for tidying data: the pivot functions.