Exploration and description

So why go through the process described on the previous pages? When a recorder works across the plots he/she will start at plot 1, move along the row, plot by plot, until he/she reaches the end of the row. Rather than walk back to the beginning of the second row he/she can simply turn around and work backwards. So the preparation of the spreadsheet in this way simplifies the task of data collection.

This spreadsheet can now be used for data collection and, with slight further modification, for data analysis. For example, one needs to right click the factor S_Treat and twice apply Spread → Factor → Recode... to enter in additional columns factors for Landrace and Fertiliser. Note that there is absolutely no need to sort the file to put treatments into ascending order. GenStat can handle data presented in any order; this was not appreciated when analysis was commenced for this study and, as can be seen, CS16Data1a has been sorted into treatment order. As will be seen under Exploration and Description it then becomes a little difficult to check individual data values against their plot numbers.