Transpose Data Frame & Set First Column as Header in R (Example)

In this tutorial, I’ll illustrate how to transpose a data matrix and use the first variable as column names in R.

The article contains one example for the transposing of a data matrix and with the first variable as header. To be more specific, the article will contain these topics:

Let’s dive right in…

Creating Example Data

The following data is used as basement for this R programming language tutorial:

data <- data.frame(head = paste0("x", 1:4),                  # Create example data
                   row1 = 1:4,
                   row2 = 11:14,
                   row3 = 101:104)
data                                                         # Print example data

Table 1 shows that our example data consists of four rows and four columns called “head”, “row1”, “row2”, and “row3”.

Example: Transposing Data Frame & Maintaining First Column as Heading

This section demonstrates how to transpose a data matrix and use the first column of the input data frame as header.

For this task, we can use the t, data.frame, and setNames functions as shown below:

data_t <- setNames(data.frame(t(data[ , - 1])), data[ , 1])  # Transpose data
data_t                                                       # Print transposed data

As shown in Table 2, the previous R code has created a transposed version of our data with the first variable as column names.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

I have recently released a video on my YouTube channel, which explains the examples of this article. You can find the video below.

The YouTube video will be added soon.

Besides the video, you may read the related R programming tutorials on my homepage. I have released several articles that are related to the transposing of a data matrix and with the first variable as header already.

• Move Column to First Position of Data Frame
• Extract Single Column as Data Frame
• Set Row & Column Names of Data with Unknown Dimension
• R Programming Examples

In summary: In this R tutorial you have learned how to rotate a data frame and keep the first variable as column names. In case you have additional questions, please let me know in the comments.