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

Leveraging calculated fields

Calculated fields are custom fields that you can add to data sources and charts. These fields are derived from existing fields in the data source, including other calculated fields. A calculated field can be either a dimension or a metric.

Looker Studio provides several functions grouped under six categories to help create useful calculated fields. These include the following:

  • Arithmetic
  • Conditional
  • Date
  • Geo
  • Text
  • Aggregation
  • Miscellaneous

Calculated fields serve many purposes. They enable you to implement business logic, create user-friendly representations of data, and create complex metrics beyond simple aggregations.

Arithmetic functions enable you to perform mathematical operations such as computing logarithms, exponentials, trigonometric values, or nearest integers on numeric data. You can also do simple math using regular operators for addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. With date functions...