Looker Studio Report Designer

A report is the core element of Google Looker Studio and allows you to build data stories through visual components. It is a collection of visuals that enables you to monitor key performance metrics, describe trends and relationships, and explain relevant phenomena. In the previous chapter, you learned how to access Looker Studio and gained an understanding of its major entities – data sources, connectors, reports, and explorers. Now, you are ready to use it to build reports. Whether it is creating a view-at-a-glance dashboard depicting the overall performance of a business or a detailed report on a specific function or problem, the Looker Studio Report Designer provides a flexible, feature-rich, and easy-to-use interface.

This chapter lays out various components of the Report Designer and how you can use its key capabilities. By the end of this chapter, you will have gained an understanding of the major components of Looker Studio’s...

Technical requirements

To follow the implementation steps for the various operations described in this chapter, you need to have a Google account so that you can create reports with Looker Studio. It is recommended that you use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox as your browser. Finally, make sure Looker Studio is supported in your country (https://support.google.com/looker-studio/answer/7657679?hl=en#zippy=%2Clist-of-unsupported-countries).

Report Designer overview

You can develop a dashboard or a report using Looker Studio’s Report Designer. As an author and editor of a report, you spend almost all your time in the Report Designer. It allows you to add data to your report, build and configure charts, and add text, images, and other controls. Here, you can define filters, add pages, manage navigation, and choose color themes. The following screenshot highlights the major sections of the designer, all of which we will be reviewing in detail in the rest of this chapter:

Figure 5.1 – Major sections of the Report Designer

Let’s look at each of these components, which have been numbered, in detail:

1. Canvas: In the center is the canvas, which is where you place visuals and other elements.
2. Toolbar and menu: At the top is the toolbar, which provides shortcuts to some common operations and controls, as well as more comprehensive menu options.
3. Chart picker: You can...

Working with data for charts

This section will help you understand the major data configurations for charts and controls and how to use them. When a component is selected on the canvas, the SETUP and STYLE panels display the chart data and style formatting configurations, respectively. The SETUP tab allows you to choose the right data source and appropriate fields for the dimensions and metrics for the selected chart. The Data panel displays the list of fields that are available from the chosen data source. You can also set other properties such as sorting, filters, and so on. Figure 5.8 shows the options for the table chart type.

Adding dimensions

A dimension is a field that represents the value for each row of the dataset. They are usually descriptive attributes of your data. You can drag and drop the fields from the Data panel onto the appropriate position under the Dimension section. Alternatively, you can click on the Add dimension button to select the field from the dropdown...

Implementing filters

Depending on your objective and the data story you are going to tell, you may want to represent only a subset or slice of data in your report. You can visualize just a subset of data from the data source by defining filters. As a report editor, you can define and apply filters to one or more charts, a page, or the entire report. These filters, referred to as editor filters, are not visible to the report viewers, so they cannot be manipulated by them. Editor filters are used to visualize certain subsets or slices of data in the chart to answer specific questions. For example, you want to display sales from only the new customers over time to compare against their cost of acquisition. Or, you want to look at the top products sold in the United Kingdom. Editor filters also help in tightly controlling the user interpretation of data by limiting the data they can view within the chart. To allow report viewers to slice and dice the data in the visuals interactively...

Adding design components

Besides the charts, which we will explore in the next chapter, and the interactive controls, there are other components that you can add to the report canvas that aid in designing the report. They are as follows:

• Images
• Text
• Lines
• Shapes

Static images, such as logos, can be displayed in the report as a separate component. Alternatively, you can use an image as a background for a chart or page by increasing the transparency of the image and overlaying the charts on top of the image, not that it’s a good practice. You can either upload the image or provide a URL to add the image to the report.

The text component is useful to add anything from the report header to chart titles to annotations and more. It allows you to insert hyperlinks as well. You can link to relevant external content or a different page within the same report, thereby creating your own desired page navigation. Text is perhaps the most helpful design component...

Embedding external content

Apart from the aforementioned design components, you can also embed external content into your Looker Studio report. You can embed any content that is accessible via a URL, so long as embedding is allowed on the content by its provider. Examples include YouTube videos, Google Drive documents (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and so on), Google Calendar, and other web content, including non-Google sites.

You can even embed a Looker Studio report within another report. Just enable embedding for the Looker Studio report that you want to embed from its report settings. Report users need to have access to the embedded content to be able to view and interact with it appropriately.

To embed external content in the report, select the URL Embed icon from the toolbar and provide the content URL in the properties pane. The embedded content is displayed within the embed component and the users can interact with it as if they are doing so in the content’s native...

Styling report components

For any component you add to the report canvas, there are style properties that define how the component looks. Some properties are unique to a component type, while some others are common across different types of components. Some properties affect the structure or functionality of the component beyond just appearance. Examples include Search type for the Input box and Advanced filter controls, the number of bars in a bar chart, and so on. In this section, we will only focus on some general appearance-based style properties. Style properties that alter the functionality of a component are described in the respective sections throughout this book (for example, the Charts section in Chapter 6, Looker Studio Built-in Charts).

Background and Border

This is the one style property that applies to all report components – be it a shape, control, or chart. The only exception is the line element. You can set the following properties under this style:

...

Building your first Looker Studio report – creating a report from the data source

In the previous chapter, Chapter 4, Google Looker Studio Overview, you created and set up the data source using the call center dataset available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Data-Storytelling-with-Google-Data-Studio/blob/master/Call%20Center%20Data.csv. In this section, you will create a report from that data source, configure some settings, and add a couple of components. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Call Center data source from the Looker Studio home page.
2. Click the CREATE REPORT button at the top to create a new report and confirm this to add this data to the report.
3. Rename the report Call Center Analysis
4. Open the Report Settings pane by selecting the appropriate option from the File menu. Set Call Center for Data Source and add CallDateTime for Date Range Dimension.
5. From the File menu, select the Current page settings option to open the pane on the right...

Summary

As a report editor, you will spend most of your time working in the report designer, adding and configuring charts and controls. In this chapter, we explored various elements of the Report Designer. At the report level, you can add additional data sources, manage report pages, and choose report themes and other settings. We also looked at ways to add charts and additional data sources.

Designing a report component usually involves setting the appropriate data and style properties. You can define the data format, sorting, and aggregations for data fields that are represented in the component. You can add interactive filter controls to the report to enable report viewers to slice and dice the data without needing to edit the report configuration. There are some non-data components such as lines, shapes, and images that you can use to enhance the look and utility of your report.

In the next chapter, we will look into various chart types and how to configure them.

...