What are Measures?
Measures is a general name for measurements, metrics or facts which are of interest in the data analysis. Measures are mostly numerical in nature. Examples of measures are sales, quantity, accounts, and so on.
A measure value is computed for a given point or cell by aggregating the data corresponding to the respective dimension intersection for the cell.
In Spotfire, each measure is represented as a column. Such a column is generally what you would put on the value axis of a visualization. Since measures are calculated by the OLAP cube you cannot change the aggregation method for measures in Spotfire.
In SAP BW, measures are referred to as 'Key Figures'.