Creating Summary Tables - Why Bother?

After completing a lab on how to make summary tables, I have realized that creating summary tables are necessary to see trends in larger data sets that you might not otherwise see, as well as to manipulate this data. Summary tables allow you to compare parts of data that are more obscure and helps you to look at this data in new ways.

When testing a summary table, I realized that you are not only able to manipulate data, but create new data. For example, tables can make it easier to compute averages or count numbers of votes or ratings. This new data and manipulation can lead to different types of charts and other visualizations. In conclusion, computation and data aggregation is made a lot easier with the use of summary tables, adding new insights to the data gathered.