What Are Metrics & Dimensions? | BI For Beginners

In this video we're going to be looking at one of the basic concepts of data and data visualization, metrics and dimensions. Coming up. When you're working with data it's important to know what you're working with and your data is made up of metrics and dimensions. Now let's break them down and take a look at the characteristics of each of these types of data points then we'll jump into an example data set and identify them. Let's start with metrics and the first thing to know is that their quantitative data points which basically means they're used for quantifying or measuring things. As such they're always numbers. Now although all metrics and numbers not all numbers in your data are metrics and I'll explain this in a minute when we look at our dataset. For the purposes of data analysis and visualization metrics are an essential element of all queries. A query is simply a question you ask your data like what's my total revenue for the year. Without a metric you cannot visualize data in any meaningful way . And finally when analyzing data metrics will always have an aggregator attached like sum, average, minimum or maximum, among others. Again I'll show you what this means when we look at our data set in a minute. Now let's break down dimensions. So whereas metrics are quantitative, dimensions are the qualitative data points, so used to measure the quality of something. Nine times out of ten dimensions will be text data points but they can also be numbers and I'll demonstrate this in a minute. Dimensions are essential for visualizing data without them you can't create charts and graphs because they're used to break down the metrics. So now that we have a basic understanding of what metrics and dimensions are let's take a look at an example data set and identify them. So here's my data in excel which is just a standard data set in a rows in columns structure. So if metrics are the numbers, here that means order quantity, profit and unit price. But you may notice that Order ID is made up of numbers as well but they aren't metrics because they're not quantitative which is the first characteristic of metrics we saw. Instead Order ID is a dimension because it's qualitative along with delivery class, region, customer segment, product category and order date. Going back to metrics for a second, we talked about them always having aggregators. What I mean by this is that when I highlight one of my metrics columns, down here at the bottom we can see what the sum average and count of the numbers in the column are. I mentioned earlier that dimensions are essential for visualizing data and here's what I mean. Here I have a pivot table which I'll do a full video on at a later date and I've added our profit metric as a value which is giving me the sum of all the values in the profit column in my data set. If I try to create a chart of this single figure I'm going to get a message telling me I can't. In order to visualize this sum of profit I'm going to need to break it down by a dimension, say, customer segment and when I do this I can create a chart of data like this. You can see my metric is being broken down by my dimension to create my chart. I also mentioned earlier that metrics or numbers can be used as dimensions as well. Here's an example. If I put order quantity which is a metric into rows you can see the result is showing me the different values in my order quantity column and the corresponding sum of profit for those rows where those quantity values occur. What's happening is that the order quantity metric is being treated as though it's qualitative or contains text values. So hopefully now you have a better understanding of what metrics and dimensions are and how they're used in data analysis and visualization. If you like this video don't forget to drop a like and if you want to learn more about business intelligence in general please do subscribe to the channel and click that bell to get notified whenever we upload new material. Until then have a great day and stay BI-Curious.

Channel: LearnBI.online (formerly Vitamin BI)

Views: 16,527

Keywords: analytics, bi, business data, business intelligence, business intelligence analyst, business intelligence basic concepts, business intelligence tutorial, dashboards, data analysis, data analytics, data science, data studio, data visualisation, data visualization, dimensions, how to analyse data, kpi, metrics, pivot table, vitamin business intelligence, what are dimensions, what are kpis, what are metrics, what are metrics and dimensions, what is bi, what is business intelligence

Id: j7HuAWl4VW8

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2018