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

Optimizing reports for performance

Fast report load times and responsiveness are paramount for a good user experience in any visualization tool. Certain design and implementation choices may adversely impact report efficiency. In this section, you will learn about several techniques that will help you optimize Looker Studio reports performance-wise. Some of the considerations here may only be relevant when dealing with truly large volumes of data.

Optimizing data sources

A major reason for lag in Looker Studio is the volume or size of the data being queried. Hence, the first place you can look to for improving the performance of your reports is the data sources.

Modeling the data source

Data sources in Looker Studio are logical constructs and do not pull data from underlying datasets unless this is requested from reports and explorations. Typically, date ranges and other filters defined at the report level determine the maximum volume of data the report can retrieve and...