Reference: Summarization and Attribute Viz Fields

Discovery board visualizations use attribute and summarization fields to control how Workday analyzes and groups data.

Field Type	Considerations and Examples
Attribute	An attribute field describes a property of an entity. The data answers who, what, when, and where questions and can be any field type on a data source.
Summarization	A summarization field enables you to analyze the attributes as categories. You can analyze the aggregated data in summarization fields from different perspectives to derive meaning from the data. Workday creates summarization fields for each currency and numeric field in the data source. You can make the data in those fields less granular by using a summarization field. You can use: Currency or numeric fields to aggregate numeric data from multiple rows by selecting AVG , MAX , MIN , or SUM . Single instance or text fields to aggregate data by selecting COUNT DISTINCT . Workday ignores case-sensitivity and groups values with special characters and different spellings. Example: Workday , workday , and W0rkday group as 2 distinct instances because of the misspelling of the third instance.

Field Type

Considerations and Examples

Attribute

An attribute field describes a property of an entity. The data answers who, what, when, and where questions and can be any field type on a data source.

Summarization

A summarization field enables you to analyze the attributes as categories. You can analyze the aggregated data in summarization fields from different perspectives to derive meaning from the data.

Workday creates summarization fields for each currency and numeric field in the data source. You can make the data in those fields less granular by using a summarization field.

You can use:

Currency or numeric fields to aggregate numeric data from multiple rows by selecting AVG
, MAX
, MIN
, or SUM
.

Single instance or text fields to aggregate data by selecting COUNT DISTINCT
.

Workday ignores case-sensitivity and groups values with special characters and different spellings. Example: Workday
, workday
, and W0rkday
group as 2 distinct instances because of the misspelling of the third instance.

You can place attribute and summarization fields only in some drop zones in a viz depending on the viz type. Some viz types, such as Chart and Pivot Table, must contain at least 1 summarization field. If you don’t use a summarization field in a drop zone, Workday uses the Count
summarization in the viz, which is a count of all records.

The values in a currency and numeric attribute field are individual, finite, discrete values. The values in a currency and numeric summarization field are infinite within a range of continuous values. You can use some numeric data as both an attribute and summarization field, such as length. However, some numeric data isn't continuous and you should use them only as an attribute, such as USA zip codes.