Preprocessing: excel table headers into categoricals

I recieve test data in a 'nice to look at' format in an excel file as below. The test setups are divided as headers over two rows.

I would like to do statistical comparisons of the values based on the different setups as categories, eg H values vs V values or the different positions RU vs LT for example. This would however require the data to be at the following format.

Is there a way to re-arrange the data from the first table with headers to a table where all values are stacked and the categoires in their own columns in a fairly easy way without using copy paste in excel prior to import?

I currently have the data imported to a table in matlab similar to the first format but the headers are only called pos_1, pos_2 etc so the directional and position information is not included.

BR, Emelie

Answer 1

[Eric Sofen]

stack is the function that does the operation that converts a "wide" table with separate variables to a "tall" table with an indicator variable. Because of the two levels of hierarchy (LT/RT/LU/RU and H/V), you'll need to call stack multiple times and then vertically concatenate the results together.

Hope that helps gets you started.