Welcome to this instructional reading on getting started with Google’s Looker Studio.

This instructional reading will give you the basic knowledge required to help you complete the hands-on labs and final assignment for Looker Studio if you decide to use this product instead of IBM Cognos Analytics.

Looker Studio was originally named Google Data Studio, and it is essentially a free cloud-based tool to visualize your data using a variety of visualizations, including dashboards and multipage reports.

In this reading, we will discuss:

Navigating the Looker Studio Interface

You can access Looker Studio by navigating to https://lookerstudio.google.com/ in your web browser. All you need to access Looker Studio is a valid free Google account.

You will be redirected to the Recent section of the Looker Studio home page, where you will see a list of templates to choose from to start your first report. You will also see any recent reports and dashboards you have already worked on.

Here, on the Reports tab, we can see that there are no recent files, as this is our first time opening the Looker Studio interface. The same applies to the Data sources and Explorer tabs, too.

The Template Gallery can be accessed by clicking Templates in the left navigation menu on the home page.

You can also browse the various templates by their category, such as Google Analytics, Google Sheets, and BigQuery, by scrolling down the page, or you can filter the Template Gallery view by one or more of those categories.

From the Create button, you can create Reports, Data sources, and Explorers.

We will discuss Reports and Data sources in the readings in this course, and you will practice with them in the hands-on labs and the final assignment. However, you won’t use Explorers in this course, as they are currently an experimental feature in Beta.

Creating Reports

You create reports in Looker Studio to enable you to visualize your data and get better insights into your data. You can then share those reports with your colleagues or customers.

You can either create a blank report from scratch and add components to it, or you can create a report from an existing template and either use it as it is or modify it to meet your own needs.

To create a report from a template:

  1. Click Templates .

  2. Select a template from the gallery.

  3. In the template, you can use the provided dataset or click Use my own data to upload your own data and populate the template with it.

  1. You can start to edit the template by choosing Edit and share .

  1. Click ADD TO REPORT in the pop-up dialog box.

  1. Then, use the Report Editor to make changes to the copy report from the template.

To create a blank report:

  1. Click Create , then select Report .

  2. On the Add data to report page, you need to select a connector for your data source.

  3. After selecting a connector, you can drag and drop your file directly onto the window.

  1. Alternatively, you can click the CLICK TO UPLOAD FILES button, then browse to the location where the dataset file is stored and open it.

  1. The file will start being processed.

  1. Once the file has finished being processed and uploaded, the status will change to Uploaded , and you can click Add to add it as a data source to your blank report.

  1. The untiled report will be displayed with the data added.

  1. Looker Studio will make assumptions about how you want the data displayed and visualized, but you can modify this as you see fit and add more data fields to the report to create more visualizations from.

  1. Click the View button in the top right of the page to view the report as a user would see it.

  1. The report will be displayed in read-only mode. Click the Edit button in the top right of the page to return to edit mode.

  1. You can use the Share button in either ‘Edit’ or ‘View’ mode to share your report with colleagues.

  1. The report can either be shared as an email invitation to individual users or groups of users.

  1. It can also be shared via a link.

  1. Then, you can copy the link and send it directly to those people who you wish to be able to access it via the link.

You can also embed the report as code or as a URL or download the report as a PDF and then share it as a file instead.

Connecting to Data Sources

Data sources enable you to manage the connections to your data and configure the data fields in your data that you will use in your reports. You may also see the term connector being used instead of data source , but they are two slightly different components.

Connectors and data sources

Connectors are the components that connect your underlying data to Looker Studio features.

Whereas data sources are the components that represent a specific instance of a connector, such as a connection to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, an SQL Server database, or a CSV file.

So, connectors are used by a data source to retrieve your data from a given data platform or database product.

Whenever you create a report, you’ll notice that you are first asked for a data source to connect to.

As we’ve seen, on the Connect to Data tab of the Add Data to Report window, you can create a new data source for your report by selecting one of many available connectors, such as the Google Sheets connector.

Then, you need to either navigate to a local file to upload or connect to a database system, or in the case of the Google Sheets connector, you need to select a worksheet from your Google Drive to add.

Then, the Report Editor will open a new report with your selected data already embedded.

Alternatively, if you select the My data sources tab of the Add data to report window, you can add an existing data source to your report by selecting from one of your listed data sources.

After selecting an existing data source, add it to your report.

The Report Editor will open, and a chart connected to your existing data source will already be added to your report.

Adding Visualizations to a Report

You can add various types of charts to your reports to help tell a visual story about your data.

In the Report Editor window, click Add a chart from the toolbar, then select a chart type from the list, such as a bar chart, pie chart, line chart, map, or bubble chart.

Having selected a chart type, such as a pie chart, you then decide where you want to place the new chart on your canvas by clicking the mouse in that position.

The chart will be added to the canvas.

You can drag and drop a chart anywhere else on the canvas if you decide you want to change its position.

You can use the drag handles in the corners to resize the chart object.

Whenever a chart is selected, you will see a Data button and a Properties button displayed on the far right side of the page.

The Properties button displays the chart’s properties in a pane on the right, and you can use this to configure your chart. On the SETUP tab, you configure the data fields that are displayed in the chart and configure filters.

On the STYLE tab, you configure the look and feel of the chart, such as the colors used, the data labels, the legend, and the background and border.

The Data button displays the source data embedded in the chart and all the fields contained in that data source.

Both these buttons can be toggled on or off to show or hide them.

With both buttons switched on, you can easily drop a field from the Data pane to a Dimension or Metric field in the SETUP tab of the Properties pane to modify the chart.

The chart will update with your changes. Here, the Dimension has been changed from First Name to Product Line .

While here, the Metric has been changed from Record Count to Revenue .

Using this approach, you can add multiple different visualizations to your reports to create an informative and appealing dashboard.

Configuring Theme and Layout Settings

Looker Studio doesn’t use a predefined dashboard template layout for the canvas, as seen in Cognos Analytics by default. This means you have the flexibility to place your visualizations wherever you want on the canvas rather than in specified panels.

What Looker Studio does have is the Theme and layout pane. You can open this pane from the File menu or toolbar.

On the THEME tab, you can choose one of the predefined themes for your report or make your own custom themes.

When you apply a theme, it gets applied to all the pages in your report.

On the LAYOUT tab, you can modify elements of the canvas, such as where the page navigation should be, the display mode, the canvas size, and guides and grid settings.