Creating a Tableau Text Table with Measures and Dimensions

Part of our ongoing Tableau series, this article explains how to create a text table.

You can think of a text table in Tableau as the same as a pivot table in Excel. It’s a table, not a chart, with one or more values in the rows and one or more values in the columns. The easiest way to picture a text table is to think of sales or expenses by date. In this example, we will use expenses.

(This article is part of our Tableau Online Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Putting data in Tableau

If you’re new to Tableau, see our starter article Tableau: Getting Started with Real Examples. For the data, I’m using my credit card statements. You can easily download your credit card into one of the supported data sources, like PostgreSQL.

Defining measures and dimensions

First, we need to understand two concepts: measures and dimensions. There are long definitions in various tutorials that try to explain what dimensions and measures are. But here’s a really easy one:

• A measure is a number, which is anything you can do math on. A measure includes expenses, sales, etc.
• A dimension is anything that is not a number, such as dates, or text fields like category.

In Tableau, fields are grouped by dimension and measures on the left-hand side of the worksheet editor, like this: