None of the techniques -- sorting, scatter graphs, grouping, or calculating means -- that are highlighted in this work are particularly sophisticated, and yet their simplicity is often more than adequate for displaying the trends in data or for making comparisons in a convincing way. These are strategies that are easy to introduce to students and that allow students to grapple with the complexities of multivariate data. In particular, the author highlights the mean as a statistic that allows students to make comparisons across groups. The discussion also highlights an even more important issue: the need to help students to understand that the purpose and power of statistics is for answering questions using data and that answering questions also means convincing others of the validity of the answers found. The techniques described here, and the more sophisticated ones learned later in students' statistical education, allow us to find answers in data, and provide evidence for others of the trends that we observe. If students do not appreciate this purpose, then there is no motivation to carry out data exploration or to go through the data representation process with the intention of conveying a convincing message.