 If you're going to work with data, you have to have some data and you have to have it in Google Sheets. Now, the fundamental way to do this is to enter the data directly into Google Sheets. And there's a lot of times where that's the preferable solution. If you're going to be working with a statistical program like SPSS or SAS, it's so much easier to put it into a spreadsheet. There's a lot of advantages to it. One is it's really easy to share and have several people working simultaneously on what you're doing here. Now, I want to show you if you're going to be entering data manually, and say for instance, you're going to be entering it based on paper surveys that you have, there's a few things you want to do to make your life a little easy. First off, you want to have what's called tidy data. That's a term developed by Hadley Wickham, who works with the statistical programming language R. And it means that a variable is the same thing as a column and that a case is the same thing as his row. And there's no funny business going on in your sheet. So let's start with this one. If you're entering paper, the first thing you need to do is have an ID number so that you can find the piece of paper in case something gets entered wrong. Now, you may need to get out of pen and write these numbers on a piece of paper. And then maybe you start putting in the questions. Now I want to show you something kind of neat that Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are able to do. And what that is is propagating. So if you take a pattern that's easy to follow. So for instance, I like to type q zero one where q is for question. And then do q zero two for question two. Mind you, I'm not doing q one q two because it's going to think that means quarter one quarter two in the year. But if I do the leading zeros, especially if there's more than nine questions, this is important, I can select those first two, then I can just drag them over. And it will propagate and fill in with the same pattern, you can do that for however many you have. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this top column, I'm going to put it in bold. And maybe I will even center the columns, you don't have to and there's a there is a precedent for text columns being justified to the left and numbers being justified to the right. You know, it's up to you. Sometimes I just like to do this so that the labels are directly above the numbers and it's a little easier to see what's going on. And then I'm going to freeze the top row by simply dragging this bar down. And now when you scroll up and down that top row stays put. If you're going to be entering data from pieces of paper, like I said, you need ID numbers. And so you go like this one, two, three, and it can propagate that same pattern. So I'll drag it down a little bit. And now we've got the numbers, as long as those match up with what's on your paper, you're good to go. If several people are entering the data, then you might want to be able to separate who has what. And the first person might start with 101. And then 102. So the one, the first, the 100 indicates the person, the second number indicates which one they're working on. And then the next person can start with 201 and 202. It's okay that there are gaps that you go straight from 107 to 201. You just can't have repeats. That's the important thing. And this way, people can be working separately on their own computers and they can be entering the data simultaneously in the same sheet. And it gets in there, it's wonderful. And so the very simple method for entering this is to type in a number, let's say you've got a rating scale and people are putting in a number, then I hit tab, go to the next one or a right arrow and nine and I can go through and enter like this. I'm just hitting tab at each point. When I get to the end, I hit return. And it takes me back to where I started on the first line. And I can go on like this, I can type in the data however I want. If you have missing data, if a person didn't answer a question, it's best to simply leave it blank. And then if they typed in something, you can put in eight, although I would hope that they didn't type in something on what's supposed to be a numerical variable. But the idea here is you can put in whatever you want and you enter the data all the way through. And now you have entered your data manually, and you're prepared to do subsequent analyses.