Increased emphasis has been given to students' engagement with experimental data as reform efforts have continued to transform the landscape of introductory physics laboratory courses by providing greater oppor- tunities for authentic scientific inquiry and student agency. As a result, students become the primary driving forces of their own experimentation, and the manner in which they engage with experimental data becomes more complex and nonlinear. This study presents ongoing efforts to illuminate the nuanced ways students enact various data-based actions when engaging in physics laboratory experiments. In this paper, we present a single case-study analysis of a student group engaging in an inquiry-based physics laboratory to highlight the complex and iterative ways the group shifts between multiple data-based actions when expected to be engaging in a single laboratory task. Research data comes from audio and video files of students' computers while they engaged in lab experimentation, coded using a constructivist grounded theory approach to identify multiple data-based ac- tions performed by the students. Results of this case study show that students oftentimes shift between multiple data-based actions on short timescales and that these shifts can take place with implicit iterative patterns, even when the instructional setting is structured for a single experimental task.