I have spent some time now learning RESHAPE2 and plyr but I still do not get it. This time I have a problem with (a) subtotals and (b) passing different aggregate functions . Here an example using data from the excellent tutorial on the blog of mrdwab http://news.mrdwab.com/ # libraries library(plyr) library(reshape2) # get data and add few more variables book.sales = read.csv("http://news.mrdwab.com/data-booksales") book.sales$Stock = book.sales$Quantity + 10 book.sales$SubjCat[(book.sales$Subject == 'Economics') | (book.sales$Subject == 'Management') ] <- '1_EconSciences' book.sales$SubjCat[book.sales$Subject %in% c('Anthropology', 'Politics', 'Sociology') ] <- '2_SocSciences' book.sales$SubjCat[book.sales$Subject %in% c('Communication', 'Fiction', 'History', 'Research', 'Statistics') ] <- '3_other' # to get to my starting dataframe (close to the project I am working on) book.sales1 <- ddply(book.sales, c('Region', 'Representative', 'SubjCat', 'Subject', 'Publisher'), summarize, Stock = sum(Stock), Sold = sum(Quantity), Ratio = round((100 * sum(Quantity)/ sum(Stock)), digits = 1)) #melt it m.book.sales = melt(data = book.sales1, id.vars = c('Region', 'Representative', 'SubjCat', 'Subject', 'Publisher'), measured.vars = c('Stock', 'Sold', 'Ratio')) # cast it Tab1 <- dcast(data = m.book.sales, formula = Region + Representative ~ Publisher + variable, fun.aggregate = sum, margins = c('Region', 'Representative')) Now my questions : I have been able to add the subtotals in rows. But is it possible also to add margins in the columns. Say for example, Totals of Stock for one Publisher ? Sorry I meant to say example total sold for all publishers There is a problem with the columns with “ratio”. How can I get “mean” instead of “sum” for this variable ? P.S: I have seen some examples using reshape. Will you recommend to use it instead of reshape2 (which seems not to include the functionalities of two functions).