Video: What is a Dimension?

In this video, we’re going to learn what I mean when I say “Dimension” and “Summary” as understanding these terms is critical to understanding how Navo works. To do this, I’m going to show you both Navo - on top - and Excel- on the bottom, so you can see what’s going on.

To understand what Dimensions and Summaries are, I’m going to first show you my data in Excel. As you can see here, I have an excel spreadsheet with just shy of fifty thousand rows. Each of those rows represents part of an order from my fictitious dairy farm. It includes an order number, a product, a customer, and so forth. It also includes a number of units of the product, the Cost, and expected Revenue from the products on that row.

Obviously, I can’t look at that many rows at a time and make any sense out of them. So what Navo does is compress rows together. I can look at nine different Product Families a lot easier than I can look at 50 thousand values!

The way rows get compressed together is where Dimensions and Summaries come into play. Dimensions are different ways of compressing rows. In this display, our dimension - the one in blue - is Product Family. That means that each row of this display corresponds to every row in the original data that has that value in the Product Family column. For example, this row represents all of the rows with the value “Milk” in the Product Family column - which is currently all of the highlighted rows we can see in Excel - although there are many, many more milk rows than what you can see here. If my dimension was, say “Salesperson”, then each row of my display would be a different salesperson. The rows in Navo would be different - each one would sum up a different salesperson. However, all of the same excel rows would be represented in each display - just shuffled differently among the rows in Navo.

Next are the summary columns - the ones in green. A Summary is something that you want to summarize - in this case, adding it up. Each cell in here corresponds to the total for all of the rows in the original data that match that dimension value. In other words, this cell here (select Cases for Assil) is the total of all of the values in the Cases column in the original data that have Assil as the value for Salesperson.

Usually - but not always - Dimensions are strings - bits of text. Summaries, on the other hand, are always numbers. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to add them up!

And there you have it! Hopefully this has reduced the mystery behind the terms “Dimension” and “Summary”. These terms will come up a lot as you learn more and more about Navo and how to use it.