Given a collection of data, sorting the data may provide several useful descriptors. When sorting data, you can easily use something like a spreadsheet for larger data sets but in this section you will also see there are ways to perform a sort by hand. In either case, statistical measures of position generally involve very little computational work once the data is sorted and take into account only the order of the data from lowest to highest. To assist with notation, we will generally use x-values to represent the original raw data and y-values to represent that same data when ordered with the subscript indicating the positional placement.