Undergraduate STEM students are graduating into professions that require them to manage and work with data at many points of a data management life cycle. Within ecology, students are presented not only with many opportunities to collect data themselves, but increasingly to access and use public data collected by others. This activity introduces the basic concept of data management, spreadsheet management, and metadata to allow meaningful data analysis. The accompanying presentation materials mention the importance of considering long-term data storage and data analysis using public data.