Often there is little or no substitute for plotting the data to see how it is distributed. A scatter plot, histogram, density plot, etc. is almost always going to tell you a "story" about the data that the summary stats will have compressed.

But sometimes you are at the mercy of the data and your visualization of choice. Box plots, for example, are great at showing more than just how the data is centered, but it is possible to encounter situations where the box plots of the data remain static while the underlying data is clearly changing [0].

As always it is good to know about these things and continue to add to the arsenal (violin plots, in the example above) of tools and intuition needed to tease out the story behind the data.

0: https://www.research.autodesk.com/publications/same-stats-di...