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

Choosing the right visuals

Using the right chart types to represent data is perhaps the most important design decision you need to make as a dashboard developer. In this section, we will review the most common types of charts and discuss how to use them appropriately.

Figure 3.1 – Common chart types

Note

There are additional visualization types available to the ones discussed in this chapter that are used less widely. The objective here is to introduce only the most basic chart types rather than offering a comprehensive list. You can refer to the resources listed in the Further reading section of the chapter for broader and more in-depth coverage.

Different chart types are suitable for representing different types of data. Broadly, data can be either categorical type or numerical type. Examples of categorical data include countries, gender, education levels, and risk groups. Categorical data can be measured either on a nominal scale or an ordinal...