Before exploring Rietveld refinement, it is necessary to establish a greater understanding of powder diffraction data and what information is encoded therein in order to establish a notion of how to create a model of a diffraction pattern, which is of course necessary in Rietveld refinement. A typical diffraction pattern can be described by the positions, shapes, and intensities of multiple Bragg reflections. Each of the three mentioned properties encodes some information relating to the crystal structure, the properties of the sample, and the properties of the instrumentation. Some of these contributions are shown in Table 1, below.