Term

Definition

Workbook

A workbook contains one or more sheets, each of which can be a worksheet, dashboard, or story. You can use workbooks to organize, save, share, and publish your results.

Worksheet

A worksheet contains a single view along with shelves, cards, legends, and the Data and Analytics panes in its side bar.

Dashboard

A dashboard is a collection of views from multiple worksheets. The Dashboard and Layout panes are available in its side bar.

Story

A story contains a sequence of worksheets or dashboards that work together to convey information. The Story and Layout panes are available in its side bar.

Calculated Field

Calculated fields allow you to create new data from data that already exists in your data source. When you create a calculated field, you are essentially creating a new field (or column) in your data source, the values or members of which are determined by a calculation that you control.

Parameter

A parameter is a workbook variable such as a number, date, or string that can replace a constant value in a calculation, filter, or reference line.

Action

An action is a dashboard action which is an interactive element on a Tableau dashboard that is driven from within the worksheet. It gives the dashboard interactivity. This can be through filtering, highlighting or using set values etc.

Extract

Extracts are saved subsets of data that you can use to improve performance or to take advantage of Tableau functionality not available or supported in your original data. When you create an extract of your data, you can reduce the total amount of data by using filters and configuring other limits.

Live

This refers to a data source that contains direct connection to underlying data, which provides real-time or near real-time data. With a live connection, Tableau makes queries directly against the database or other source and returns the results of the query for use in a workbook.

Marks Card

A card to the left of the view, where you can drag fields to control mark properties such as type, color, size, shape, label, tooltip, and detail.

Packaged Workbook

A type of workbook created in either Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server. These files contain both the workbook as well as copies of the referenced local file data sources and background images.

Pane

The row and columns areas in a view.

Filter Shelf

A shelf on the left of the workbook that you can use to exclude data from a view by filtering it using measures and dimensions.

Dimension

A categorical variable from the dataset that is used to slice and dice the data into different categories. Dimensions are often discrete data.

Measure

A variable from the dataset that is meant to be aggregated. (This means it should be a number that it makes sense to do math with: sum, average, and so on.) Measures are often continuous data.

Rows and Columns Shelves

The Rows shelf and the Columns shelf is where you determine which variables will go on what axis. Put data you want displayed along the X-axis on the Columns shelf and data you want displayed on the Y-axis on the Rows shelf.

Format Pane

A pane that contains formatting settings that control the entire worksheet, as well as individual fields in the view. When open, the Format pane appears on the left side of the workbook.

Alias

Alias is an alternative that you can assign to a dimension member, to a measurement part or a field.

Legend

Serves the dual purpose of communicating Color, Size, and Shape information that exists in the view, as well as providing sorting, filtering, and highlighting capabilities.

Show Me

Tool used to automatically create visualizations based on selected fields and any fields already placed on shelves.

Pills

Fields, sets, or parameters that have been placed on one or more shelves. So named because the shape resembles a pill.