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

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...