Three essential Tableau concepts

An important stop on the road to mastering Tableau involves three essential concepts. In this section, we’ll discuss each of them:

• Dimensions and measures
• Row-level, aggregate-level, and table-level calculations
• Continuous and discrete

We’ll start by defining dimensions and measures.

Dimensions and measures

Tableau categorizes every field from an underlying data source as either a dimension or a measure. A dimension is qualitative or, to use another word, categorical. A measure is quantitative or aggregable. A measure is usually a number but may be an aggregated, non-numeric field, such as MAX (Date). A dimension is usually a text, Boolean, or date field, but may also be a number, such as Number of Records. Dimensions provide meaning to numbers by slicing those numbers into separate parts/categories. Measures without dimensions are mostly meaningless.

Let’s look at an example to understand...