Glossary of Explore Analytics Terms

Chart

A chart is a visualization of the data defined by a view.

Filter

A filter defines conditions for selecting data to include in the view. You can think of a filter as declaring "select all the rows from the table that meet the following conditions". For example, the filter "hire_date during this year" says that the view will only includes rows in which the hire_date field has a date in the current calendar year.

Reference

A reference is field with values that uniquely identify rows in another table. For example, an employee table might have a department field with department IDs corresponding to departments in a department table. Such a field allows us to join the employee table with the department table and show fields from both tables. In this example, to get the name of the department for each employee, we can "follow" the reference and select the employee's department name by selecting the name field from the department table.

View

A view is a presentation of data in the form of a list, a pivot, or a chart. A view is based on a table and can include data from additional tables by following references. The view can include a filter to apply conditions for selecting the rows that are to be included in the view.

A view can be switches between list, pivot, and chart at any time and although it keeps its settings for all three presentations, it can only be of one of these types at any given point in time.

Unless explicitly shared or published, a view is only visible to the user who created it.