Knowing what DDI is and understanding how it works and how to use it can be quite daunting—especially if you are not a programmer or coder. DDI can be quite a powerful metadata schema for the social sciences, but understanding the basics of it is a prerequisite to learning how to use it. This presentation, given as a workshop at the North American DDI user conference April 2019 in Ottawa, Canada, will tell you about the background of DDI, the different tools used to interpret it and how it is integrated into a data lifecycle workflow.