Creating panel data

You might also find it useful to use Hadley Wickham's plyr
and/or reshape2 packages, whose aim is to standardize and simplify
data manipulation tasks.

Cheers,
Bert

I have already used R enough to have correctly imported the actual 
data. After import, it is in the approximate format at the x 
dataframe I previously posted. I already found the plyr and reshape2 
packages and had assumed that the cast (or dcast) options might be 
the correct ones. Melt seemed to get me only what I already have. The 
examples I have seen thus far start with data in a various formats 
and end up in the format that I am starting with. In other words, 
they seem to do the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. So I'm 
still stuck with how to get started and whether the functions in 
reshape2 are actually the correct ones to consider.

...still looking for some help on this.

Jeff