In Tableau, the fields from your data source are stored as "pills" that you drag on different shelves to construct your data visualization.
These pills have two properties:
- Discrete or Continuous
- Dimension or Measure
So each pill will have one option from each property. Let's look a little closer:
- Discrete or Continuous: Discrete pills create headers, which split up the axis or view, while continuous pills create axes against which data will be plotted. Discrete pills are blue and continuous pills are green, so you can easily tell what type you're using.
- Dimension or Measure: Dimensions are disaggregate data and measures are aggregate data. Typically, measures and numeric data go hand-in-hand, while dimensions are more likely to be strings.