Take a look at the data This is a phrase that comes up when you first get a dataset. It is also ambiguous. Does it mean to do some exploratory modelling? Or make some histograms, scatterplots, and boxplots? Is it both? Starting down either path, you often encounter the non-trivial growing pains of working with a new dataset. The mix ups of data types – height in cm coded as a factor, categories are numerics with decimals, strings are datetimes, and somehow datetime is one long number.