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You are going to see the difference between the Blue and Green pills in Tableau Desktop
You may have noticed that there are Blue and Green pills in Tableau. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, take a look at the image below.
Ok. So, why they have different colors? - They represent dimensions and measures right? The answer is: No! They do not!
Most dimensions you use will be blue and most measures will be green. Blue pills however in fact correspond to discrete data and green pills to continuous data.
Right! So, what are Dimensions and Measures then?
Dimensions usually cannot be aggregated (summed, averaged etc), whereas measures can be. However, we can count how many names there are, and this is the aggregation. The resulting measure looks like this:
And what are Continuous and Discrete data?
Profit is a measure – you can add up or average the profit. You can measure how much profit there is. It is also a continuous data set – it can take on any value. You can have a profit of 0 or 7 million or -4.2 for instance.
We can see here that Tableau has averaged profit as the form of aggregation, but you have several options, as shown below:
Date fields are interesting examples.
They are dimensions that can be either discrete or continuous. As we can see below, the visualization can be very different depending on the type of dimension you use:
Note: Tableau intuitively places discrete fields in a table and continuous fields on an axis when you haven’t specified what type of chart you want. How your data appears when you double-click a field is therefore another indicator of whether it is discrete or continuous.
To summarise, I thought I’d share how Andy Kriebel simplified it! I found it very useful:
- Blue things group your data
- Green things count your data
- Dimensions split up the view
- Measures fill the view
If you still have questions about the difference between green and blue pills, just drop me a message!!
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- "In the End" - Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory (2000) - The band started off with the name Xero -Whaaaat?😮, then Hybrid Theory, and finally Linkin Park. They chose "Linkin Park" because Chester used to drive by Lincoln Park in Santa Monica, CA after practice and it grabbed his attention. The guys in the band liked how it sounded.