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Column Types Explained: Text

In this tutorial I’m quickly going to explain what text columns are used for in interactive visualisations in the 23degrees application. Text columns are your main way to work with names, categories and labels in your charts.

applicationUI.publishedAt 6 maggio 2026
1. How to recognize them

In 23degrees, the text column type can be identified by the orange column colour and the “A” icon. With text columns, you can also add prefixes and suffixes to enhance how labels look in your charts (for example: “District: ” or “ km²”).

How to recognize them
How to recognize them
2. Grouping, colouring and filtering

Text columns can be used as a grouping column, especially if you want to colour your charts by category or filter them by a specific group. Each unique text value becomes a category you can work with.

Grouping, colouring and filtering
Grouping, colouring and filtering
3. Legends and labels

The labels created by a text column are also the labels that appear in the legend. That means the way your text values are written directly controls how categories show up in your chart legend.

Legends and labels
Legends and labels
4. Typical uses of text columns

In general, text columns can be used as free-form labels, extra tooltip text, or grouping labels for your data. You can have as many text columns in a dataset as you need, giving you a lot of flexibility for naming, grouping and explaining your visualisations.

Typical uses of text columns
Typical uses of text columns

Check out other tutorials if you want to learn about other column types and their use cases!