ABSTRACT
Many of the techniques of summarising data are common both to data exploration and to data presentation. The three activities, exploring, summarising, and presenting data, are inextricably linked together. This chapter introduces the basic techniques available to biologists to perform these tasks, and, in doing so, demonstrates the strong links that exist between data types, problem types, and methods of data description. It describes some of the basic methods that Minitab provides for data organisation and manipulation. The chapter also introduces numerical and graphical methods of data description, explaining the circumstances where each technique is most appropriately employed. It discusses some basic manipulative skills that enables one to organise data on a computer, and presents some simple Minitab commands. The chapter shows listing and tabulating data to be simple and informative methods of displaying data, but summary statistics of central tendency and spread provided succinct methods of numerical data description.
