A study on the steps to follow in linguistic decision analysis is presented in a context of multi-criteria=multi-person decision making. Three steps are established for solving a multi-criteria decision making problem under linguistic information: (i) the choice of the linguistic term set with its semantic in order to express the linguistic performance values according to all the criteria, (ii) the choice of the aggregation operator of linguistic information in order to aggregate the linguistic performance values, and (iii) the choice of the best alternatives, which is made up by two phases: (a) the aggregation of linguistic information for obtaining a collective linguistic performance value on the alternatives, and (b) the exploitation of the collective linguistic performance value in order to establish a rank ordering among the alternatives for choosing the best alternatives. Finally, an example is shown. c © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.