From the course: Complete Guide to Analytics Engineering

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Dimensions vs. measures

Dimensions vs. measures

From the course: Complete Guide to Analytics Engineering

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Dimensions vs. measures

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- [Instructor] Let's start building some visualizations. First, let's select our statistics_by_associates query data source in the top left. Beneath the data sources, you'll see tables and the fields in our data source. Tableau breaks the columns of our data into two groups, dimensions and measures. The dimensions are listed at the top and have a blue symbol by them. Measures are listed at the bottom and have a green symbol by them. The difference between a dimension and measure can be pretty simple but also get nuanced in tableau. At the base level, a dimension is a qualitative field that describes our data. Something like name, ID number, region, date. These dimensions tell us qualities about our data. The other type are measures, which are quantitative in nature. They're numeric and give us a metric for our data. Here you can see our measures are things like maximums, means, sums, averages, durations, et cetera. Sometimes when we bring data in Tableau, the names can get a bit…

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