What purpose do formula fields serve in recipes?

Formula fields play a crucial role in recipes by allowing users to clean up dimensions and manipulate measure fields. These fields enable the creation of custom calculations, such as aggregating data, applying transformations, or performing mathematical operations on existing data. This functionality is essential for preparing data for analysis, ensuring that datasets are organized and structured effectively to meet the analytical needs.

In the context of cleaning up dimensions, formula fields can help in standardizing data formats, replacing null values, or creating categories based on specific conditions. For manipulating measure fields, they can facilitate calculations like summing, averaging, or finding percentages, thus enhancing the quality of insights derived from data analysis.

The other options do not capture the core functionality of formula fields. Creating new datasets from external sources involves data integration rather than manipulation of existing data. Generating reports automatically generally falls under reporting tools rather than the immediate function of formula fields. Sorting data pertains to the organization of datasets but does not directly relate to the manipulative capabilities that formula fields provide.