Measure Names and Measure Values

I’ve observed the following scenario frequently: a new Tableau author creates a worksheet and drags a measure to the Text shelf. They drag the second measure to various places on the view and get results that seem entirely unpredictable. The experience is very frustrating for the author since it’s so easy to accomplish this in Microsoft Excel! The good news is that it’s also easy to accomplish this in Tableau. It just requires a different approach.

Measure Names and Measure Values are generated fields in Tableau. They don’t exist in the underlying data, but they’re indispensable for creating many kinds of views. As may be guessed from its placement in the Data pane and its name, Measure Names is a dimension whose members are made up of the names of each measure in the underlying dataset. Measure Values contains the numbers or values of each measure in the dataset.

In this section, we’ll watch what happens...