My data.frame looks like this
ID | test | test_result 1 | B | 10 2 | A | 9 3 | A | 11 4 | C | 7 5 | F | 5
And
dcast from the reshape2 package does this:
require(reshape2) dcast(data, test ~ ID , value_var = 'test_result' ) # test 1 2 3 4 5 #1 A NA 9 11 NA NA #2 B 10 NA NA NA NA #3 C NA NA NA 7 NA #4 F NA NA NA NA 5