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

Blending data

Data blending is the process of combining data from multiple data sources. The resultant resource is called a blend. Blends are useful in two primary ways:

  • To bring additional information into your visualizations and controls from disparate data sources
  • To perform reaggregations, that is, aggregating an already aggregated metric such as calculating the average of averages or the maximum of distinct counts

Often, you may want to analyze data that resides in multiple underlying datasets together. While you can easily visualize this data in separate charts powered by the respective data sources in the report, the challenge is when you want to represent information from these different data sources together in a single component. Blends come to the rescue in such scenarios. Blends incorporate fields from constituent data sources, called tables, and can serve as a source for charts and controls. Through blending, Looker Studio makes it easy for you to combine...