Looking for advice on creating Tidy data from the start

Question

I have a data set that will be growing. It is categorical observations (ie, 1=yes, 2=no) by date and hour. Is the following an acceptable method of formatting for import to R or is there a better way?

Answer 1

I would use a template like this:

Using one column for the date makes it much easier to read/import into R. Also, the YYYY-MM-DD is the default format in R for date columns. Trying to write date and hour together in one column could be done but seems like it could be tedious and not as easy to see what is going on in the data. As was mentioned in the comments above, each observation should be on a separate row. Once you save the data as a csv, it will be easily imported into R. Good luck.