Book Image

Data Storytelling with Google Looker Studio

By : Sireesha Pulipati
Book Image

Data Storytelling with Google Looker Studio

By: Sireesha Pulipati

Overview of this book

Presenting data visually makes it easier for organizations and individuals to interpret and analyze information. Looker Studio is an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that enables you to transform your data into engaging visualizations. This allows you to build and share dashboards that help monitor key performance indicators, identify patterns, and generate insights to ultimately drive decisions and actions. Data Storytelling with Looker Studio begins by laying out the foundational design principles and guidelines that are essential to creating accurate, effective, and compelling data visualizations. Next, you’ll delve into features and capabilities of Looker Studio – from basic to advanced – and explore their application with examples. The subsequent chapters walk you through building dashboards with a structured three-stage process called the 3D approach using real-world examples that’ll help you understand the various design and implementation considerations. This approach involves determining the objectives and needs of the dashboard, designing its key components and layout, and developing each element of the dashboard. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the storytelling approach and be able to create data stories of your own using Looker Studio.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1 – Data Storytelling Concepts
5
Part 2 – Looker Studio Features and Capabilities
10
Part 3 – Building Data Stories with Looker Studio

Building the dashboard- Stage 3: Develop

To start creating the dashboard, first, you must set up the data source in Looker Studio.

Setting up the data source

The dataset is a CSV file that you can connect to from Looker Studio using the File Upload connector.

The steps to create the data source are as follows:

  1. Download the ZIP file from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Data-Storytelling-with-Google-Data-Studio/blob/master/customer_churn_data.zip and unzip it.
  2. From the Looker Studio home page, select Create | Data source.
  3. On the Connectors page, select File Upload and add the customer_churn_data.csv file. If you encounter any upload errors, make sure the CSV file is saved as UTF-8 CSV.
  4. Name the dataset Customer churn data.
  5. Once the file has been uploaded, click CONNECT.

Now, the data source can be enriched by renaming the fields appropriately, updating the data types, and adding new derived fields:

  • Rename the month field to year_month...