Hey R list, Can someone help me with following question? I can create a listing of the unique observations in a dataframe by using: df <- df [order(df $start),] df $first_ob[!duplicated(df $ID)] <- "1" df $first_ob[duplicated(df $ID)] <- "0" Now I want to hold specific attributes of the first observation for other (the second or third …) observation of a specific element (named ID). So for example if I have an element with ID X that is ‘ok’ in the first observation and ‘not ok’ in the second I want to hold the ‘ok’ in a therefore specified column. An example of the output would be: ID start first ob T1 T2 X 1/1/2010 1 ok ok X 2/2/2010 0 not ok ok Thanks in advance. Kind regards, John [[alternative HTML version deleted]]