This is one of the most important steps when building dashboards that effectively communicate your message. Data typing happens during the dataset creation process. By typing your data correctly, you ensure that when building blocks, you’ll be able to perform mathematical operations and present the data in the best possible way.

Data types

Three categories of data types are available:

• Text
• Date
• Numeric

Let’s talk a bit about these types.

Text

Text data types are used for information such as names, categories, or any other non-numerical data. When a data is typed as text, the only operations available are count and count distinct, limiting the ability to perform other calculations or data manipulations while building your blocks.

Let's understand this with an example.

When building this dataset, I typed the first column as text since it refers to the names of the projects that are currently in progress.

So, when I used the "Project" column to build a block, the only operations I could perform were count or count distinct, since with text data, I can't perform operations like sum, calculate maximums or minimums, or find the average.