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

Configuring pie and donut charts

Pie charts enable you to visualize data as parts of the whole. They are a good choice for depicting a few categories with largely varying proportions. In this section, we will learn how to configure pie charts and donut charts using the Call Center data source.

Looker Studio allows you to visualize up to 20 slices. However, depicting more than five slices usually wouldn’t be very useful or effective. Consider the pie chart on the left in the following figure. It represents the proportion of calls by the top 10 call reasons. The pie chart on the right provides a much better representation with fewer slices:

Figure 6.36 – A pie chart with too many slices (on the left) and a pie chart with an optimal number of slices (on the right)

The slices are automatically sorted by the decreasing order of the chart metric. If the number of dimension values is more than the number of slices configured, Looker Studio automatically...