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Data Exploration Concepts

As you learn how to explore and visualize your data, it’s helpful to review key concepts such as visualization, measure, and dimension.

A visualization is commonly a chart or graph, such as a bar chart, donut chart, timeline, or heat map. It can also be data in tabular form, such as a comparison table or pivot table. Every visualization has an underlying query, which is how Analytics retrieves information from the source data.

A measure is a quantitative value, like revenue and exchange rate. You can do math on measures, such as calculating the total revenue and minimum exchange rate. Measures have names (revenue) and values ($1,000,000). When you’re viewing a chart visualization in Analytics, it’s important to remember:
  • The chart either shows a slice of your data based on the number of or amount of something, or it shows tabular data.
  • A measure is typically aggregated in some way, which means that it’s displayed with some math already applied to it. For example, when you first view a dataset, you often see a simple aggregation such as the count of the number of rows. You typically aggregate by a different method—sum, average, maximum, and so on—as you explore and change or add measures, but you always specify how you want to aggregate at the time when you select the measure.
  • You can identify measures by their position (the far left items in the top left corner of a lens) and by the text that indicates the aggregation method (such as Sum of Revenue).
Warning

Warning

If you perform a query that aggregates measures—like sum or group by—and the resulting value exceeds the maximum for a numeric field (36,028,797,018,963,967), the value overflows and Analytics returns an incorrect result.

A dimension is a qualitative value, like region, product name, and model number. Dimensions are handy for grouping and filtering your data. Unlike measures, you can’t perform math on dimensions. Like measures, dimensions also have names (region) and values (northeast). Time is usually considered a dimension rather than a measure.