From the course: Excel Business Intelligence: Data Modeling 101

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Data tables versus lookup tables

Data tables versus lookup tables - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Business Intelligence: Data Modeling 101

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Data tables versus lookup tables

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- [Lecturer] So let's continue down this path of database normalization and talk about another really important concept, which is the idea of data tables vs. lookup tables. Now, generally speaking, models contain two types of tables. You've got data or fact tables and lookup tables, sometimes called dimension or dim tables. Now the difference between them is that data tables are your tables that contain those numbers, those quantitative values, typically at a really granular level, with ID or some sort of key columns that can be used to connect it to each of the lookups. So the transactions table that we pulled in through Power Query, that represents a data table. Now on the other hand you've got lookup tables and lookup tables provide descriptive, often text based attributes or characteristics about each dimension in a table. So let's take a look at an example. Here we've got a data table containing quantity values, so this is like quantity or transactions by day, by product, and…

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