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

To get the most out of this book

Looker Studio is a web-based tool. You need a Google account and a supported browser to follow along and benefit from the book. Basic SQL knowledge will help you explore a few topics, but is not mandatory. Access to a Google Cloud Platform account, either a free trial or paid, is nice to have and will help you visualize data from BigQuery public datasets. You can leverage the free BigQuery sandbox for this purpose as well.

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

Looker Studio (web-based)

NA

Google Cloud Platform subscription (free trial or paid) or BigQuery sandbox (free)

NA

Google Analytics (web-based)

NA

Google Cloud Platform is used to demonstrate visualizing data from BigQuery, Google’s petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse. It is leveraged only in a couple of chapters in the book. No prior knowledge of BigQuery is expected. The details of how to get started with it and connect to it from Looker Studio are included in Chapter 9, Mortgage Complaints Analysis. Google Analytics is a free Google tool and is used to monitor the reports of Looker Studio in Chapter 11, Monitoring Looker Studio Report Usage.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.