A dimension is a way of slicing numbers: the categories you group by, filter on and put along the axis of a chart. Region, store, product, customer segment, month, salesperson and channel are dimensions. They are usually text or dates. The numbers you add up — revenue, units, hours — are measures. “Revenue by region by month” has one measure and two dimensions.
Dimensions are how a business asks “which”. A distributor’s total sales figure tells it little; sales by customer, by product family and by depot tell it which customers are growing, which lines are dying and which depot is underperforming. Every dashboard filter is a dimension in disguise, and every drill-down walks from a coarse dimension (country) to a fine one (postcode).
Dimensions often come with hierarchies: year contains quarter contains month; region contains country contains city; category contains subcategory contains product. A common source of confusion is a value that could be either — is “number of employees” a measure to sum, or a dimension to band customers by (1–10, 11–50, 51+)? The answer is both, depending on the question, which is why good tools let you create a banded dimension from a numeric column.
In Klayara, dimensions and measures are recognised automatically from your tables, dropped into charts by drag and drop, and any measure can be banded into a new dimension with a calculated field. See dashboards and formulas.