Merging different time series into one?

[mattd17]

Hi, i'm stuck on a weird time series quirk. I've worked with time series in the past formats in the past where the format is something like this:

Date	Series	Value
2019-03-31	GDP	30.01
2018-12-31	GDP	29.99
etc	etc	etc
2019-06-31	Employment	4,024
2019-05-30	Employment	4,001
etc	etc	etc

That's my goal format. Right, now I have an excel spreadsheet with a ton of different time series - some are monthly, some are quarterly, some are updated as of most recent month end where others are a few months lagged. Lots of different start dates and end dates. So the input sheet looks something like this:

Date	GDP	Date	Employment	Date	Housing Starts	Date	Series 1	Date	Series 2
2019-03-31	30.01	2019-06-30	4,024	2019-07-31	505	etc	etc	etc	etc
2018-12-31	29.99	2019-05-30	4,001	2019-06-30	515	etc	etc	etc	etc

I have several dozen different economic time series in the second format, that I'm looking to standardize into the first format. Having trouble building the workflows to get there... I'm using the transpose tab, but then it looks something like this:

Name	Value
Date	2019-03-31
GDP	30.01
Date	2019-06-31
Employment	4,024

I feel like i'm missing something simple, but cross-tab isn't getting me there with how I'm trying to get it into the first step? Appreciate any help and thanks in advance!

Regards,

Matt

[JessieC · Accepted solution]

Hi @mattd17 ,

I came up with a solution (although not the most sophisticated) - 

See attached.

[mattd17]

This works, thank you @JessieC !