Learning Tableau 2019 - Third Edition

Wide data

Wide data describes a structure in which a measure in a single row is spread over multiple columns. This data is often more human readable. Wide data often results in fewer rows with more columns.

Here is an example of what wide data looks like in a table of population numbers:

Country Name	1960	1961	1962	1963	1964
Afghanistan	8,774,440	8,953,544	9,141,783	9,339,507	9,547,131
Australia	10,276,477	10,483,000	10,742,000	10,950,000	11,167,000

Notice that the level of detail for this table is a row for every country. However, the single measure (population) is not stored in a single column. This data is wide because it has a single measure (population) that is being divided into multiple ...