Hadley Wickham's tidy data is also an excellent read: http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html I work closely wi

Hadley Wickham's tidy data is also an excellent read: http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html I work closely with social scientists and it's common in those disciplines to embed narrative and presentation data in spreadsheets.. articles like this and the Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing (http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005510 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...) are nice summaries of good practices.