Introduction to Tableau - Communicating Data with Tableau - page 23

Sort , Group , Show Labels , Toggle to Presentation Mode , and change the Fit of the sheets,
among a few other icons.
Data types
When a user connects to a data source, Tableau automatically classifies each field as either a
Dimension or a Measure . It's helpful to think of Dimensions as fields you can use to group or
categorize your data; Measures are fields you can do math with, like summing or averaging.
Dimensions can be further grouped into strings, dates, and geographic fields (which generate
latitude and longitude Measures based on internal lookup tables native to Tableau). Measures
can be either discrete or continuous (more about this later).
To illustrate the difference between the different data types in Tableau, let's consider a very
simple data table: the population and surface area of the boroughs of New York, as shown in
Figure 2-4 .
Figure 2-4. Data table showing population and area in New York boroughs
In this simple data set, Tableau interprets each column as a distinct field, and uses the
column headers (the values in the first row) as the field names. Figure 2-5 shows how these
different fields appear in Tableau.