title: Aligning Multiple Data Sets that have different time intervals or data gaps
body: <p>I have several sets of data in csv files from a variety of years. Some of the data overlaps nicely, but others have years without data, or “gaps”, some have different time intervals between data points, and most of them have different ranges of years in which the data was collected. Is there a relatively simple way of organizing these different sets of data, either in R or in Excel, to match all the data up with the years aligning? I would prefer not to do this manually with large sets of data and I am sure there must be a way to do this reasonably. </p>
  
  <p>Currently each set of data is its own csv file. It might be the most simple to combine them into one Excel, but as I said, I would prefer not to do that by hand if possible. Simply copy-pasting it in would have the years not align properly either, so I need some way to have it take the value of the years into consideration. </p>
  
  <p>Any help in this would be greatly appreciated. </p>