Table of treatment vs result

You are running an experiment to see whether light affects whether plants live or die. This time, each experimenter has 10 plants they will divide up between light and dark environments, and they will register the outcome as either "Lived" or "Died" after four weeks.  Back to overview...

If you enter your results like this:

This has most of the data for analyzing the results, but is missing any detail about which experimenter was involved in each result.

Also, this table format does not clearly represent the concept of samples and variables. Each sample (one plant) can be considered to have three attributes (or variable values):

• The experimenter (who did the experiment)
• The treatment (light or dark)
• The outcome (lived or died)

But the concept of "Outcome" has been spread over two columns.

A better way to do it is described here, where you clearly have one sample (or measurement) per row, and each column represents a (named) variable.

This is also called "Tidy Data". You can read more about Tidy Data here.