Data types and capturing data

 Most commonly used and text data can be characters, letters or punctuation. Examples of text data can be First Name, Second Name, like Steve Jobs. If data is stored as text, we can’t carry calculations on the data, and the data type can be known as alphanumeric string.

The data can be only numbers, either whole numbers or numbers with a decimal place. They can be displayed in different ways e.g. 12.56 is one with a decimal place, and can either be displayed as that, or within currency £12.56. Numbers with decimal places are also called floating point numbers and they are more complicated for the computer to store and process than whole numbers which why there are two data types for the different numbers.

This data can only have two values either YES or No. But sometimes it isn’t shown as this and can instead be TRUE or FALSE, or with two other choices. 

The data for this must be a time or only days, months and years. 11:25 is a time, 09/04/2012. The times and dates can be displayed in different ways like 9th April 2012 is another way of saying the above date.

This can be used to hold a graphical image and therefore store photos