During the course of your research, you need to document your activities in the form of a "lab notebook". In fact, you will probably have a few different lab notebooks. You may have one that is like a "journal" of ideas for projects, notes on the progress of current projects, etc.. You will probably also have a set of notebooks that report on your results. These reports will be mixtures of text, code, and graphics. These reports will for the basis of how you share data with the lab, generate slides for talks, and write manuscripts.
(These tools are also pretty useful for teaching. For example, I use note-taking software to track errors in the textbooks we use.)