Data that is retrieved from different sources will invariably have different structures. Some of these data resources need more formatting than others in order to turn them into clean, usable tables.

As previously mentioned, a table might be as simple as having a single digit in a text file. As long as users know what that digit represents, they can assign a qualitative or quantitative value to it. Imagine a situation where you are collecting rainfall measurements. Entering the amount of rainfall as subsequent rows of text into a new file constitutes a table.

The amount of rainfall is a measure; it is a quantitative fact. A dimension is a field that contains qualitative data. In this case, both the time of the day and the location of the measurement will be dimensions. Dimensions are typically formatted as date, string, or character fields, while measures are formatted as numbers. Text files do not have field formats,...