A set of tools that solves a common set of problems: you need to break a big problem down into manageable pieces, operate on each piece and then put all the pieces back together. For example, you might want to fit a model to each spatial location or time point in your study, summarise data by panels or collapse high-dimensional arrays to simpler summary statistics. The development of 'plyr' has been generously supported by 'Becton Dickinson'.