Tableau Clear Explain : Dimension & Measure
First thing first, when you receive a questions or just want to take a look the data on hand. Where do you start?
One condition is you have a clear business related question. Let’s start from here. “South region’s sales of each product category. “ How do we convert this line into data language in Tableau?
Let’s imaging the data set you are going to work on is a loaf of bread . The “value you want to measure” is called measure in Tableau . Generally speaking, the measure is a number and the dimension is how you would like to slice the number by.
There can be exceptions , such as order ID . It appears as numbers in the data, therefore, Tableau will treat it as measure. But you cannot slice order ID to get insight. Also, it is not making any use of sum up order ID . Therefore, this field is a dimension . If a field is miss-classified , we can just right click the file from within the Dimensions or Measures area of the Data pane and choosing “Convert to dimension” or “Convert to measure” as appropriate
Total profit itself is meaningless. It is dependent on context that comes in the form of being broken down by dimensions. Here we broken down the profit by the dimension of order date and segments. And we are able to start gaining insight from the data . One insight emerges is that consumers accounts for the biggest part of the profit contribution.
