I have a complicated long format dataset that I want t change into a wide one. The problem arises from one column beeing the “variable” column due to poor documentation done on Microsoft-Excel.

My dataset “Demografic” has the following three columns:

1. “VP”: (the code to identify participants) as a numeric variable

2. “Variable”: a character Variable encompassing 13 different demografic variables for every participant

3. “Value” the value for each variable in the second column, as a character variable

this it what the dataset looks like

(Alter = age, Geschlecht = gender, Abschluss = diploma)

Is there any way to just split the “variable” column so that I have one row for each participant and the variables as separate columns?
so it looks like this afterwards

Maybe converting one of the variables into a numeric/categorial one beforhand would help? Or is it better to change the dataset before importing it into r?

Feel free to further ask questions if my explanation wasn´t clear enough.