Data Storytelling with Google Looker Studio

A hands-on guide to using Looker Studio for building compelling and effective dashboards

Sireesha Pulipati

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Data Storytelling with Google Looker Studio

Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing

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First published: October 2022

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To my father, Seshagiri Rao Pulipati, who is my north star and inspiration. To my husband, Uma Shanker Avvari, for being the anchor of my life and of everything I do and achieve.

– Sireesha Pulipati

Foreword

Some years ago, I was standing on a career precipice. I was in the middle of my first ever product launch, which was being crowd funded on KickStarter. The product was a low tech boardgame approach to creating wireframes for business dashboards; it was called the Dashboard Wireframe Kit. This was a completely new environment to me, having left the world of Big 4 analytics consulting and plunged into the foray of being an independent consultant with a heavy specialization in data visualization and driving the adoption of dashboards in enterprise.

One of the very early supporters of what I was doing was the author of this book. She was a vocal advocate for storytelling with data, though what really stood out was her practical perspective on how to go about it. She had a perspective that could only be borne out of years of working in the field and actually having to figure out what works, and what was best left as theory, from the many books out there on the topic.

I’ve read these books, and many of them present excellent theory. Others present thoughtful technical approaches to using certain specific tools. Rarely do you come across a work that combines the two. Yet, that is what the author has achieved here – a highly valuable distillation of data visualization best practices, with a targeted technical application to Google Looker Studio. Put down whatever else you are reading, because this book compresses a vast amount of knowledge into a potent knowledgebase that will make you a proficient in both visualization, and in applying that expertise directly in the tool. Enjoy!

Nicholas Kelly Author | Delivering Data Analytics

Acknowledgements

Writing this book had been a joyful, challenging, and rewarding experience. Many people helped and supported me along the way. I express my deep gratitude to the Packt team for their support and guidance at every step of the process. Special thanks go to Heramb Bhavsar, for proposing the book idea and convincing me that it needed to be written. I thank my editors Nazia Sheikh and Sean Lobo, for their attention to detail that helped improve the quality of the book manyfold.

I’m grateful to Joshua Vickery for his wise counsel and for being my sounding board throughout the journey. I’m especially thankful to Remy Welch for her time, encouragement, and keen insights on the final draft. Many thanks to Corey Mc Williams and Udaya Yarasi for their feedback on some of the early drafts. A great big thank you to Nicholas Kelly for providing the foreword to the book at very short notice.

Last, but not least, I couldn’t have written this book without the sacrifices made by my husband, Uma Shanker, and my two sons, Akhil and Gowtham. They held the family fort as I spent inordinate amounts of time in the writing process over several months, and cheered me on endlessly.

Contributors

About the author

Sireesha Pulipati is an experienced data analytics and data management professional. She has spent the last decade building and managing data platforms and solutions, and she is passionate about enabling users to leverage data to solve business problems. Sireesha holds a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Her work history spans multiple industries – healthcare, media, travel and hospitality, high-tech, and more. She is currently at Google as a technical lead, helping with the business intelligence and analytics strategy for the teams building and supporting the Knowledge Graph. Outside of work, Sireesha enjoys hiking and reading books. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About the reviewers

Ganesh is a self-motivated IT professional with extensive experience in leading and managing information technology projects in companies such as Oracle and Standard Chartered Bank. He has completed a postgraduate degree with computer science as his major at Bharathidasan University, and executive education in finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. As a passionate data visualization expert, he has designed beautiful eye-catching dashboards in both Google Looker Studio and Zoho Analytics for various clients. He also specializes in the development of applications using the Zoho suite of products.

I would like to thank Packt Publishing for giving me the opportunity to review this book. I thank my family, friends, and all the well-wishers for supporting me all these years.

Ralph Spandl moved to Montreal after finishing his studies at the HdK (University of Fine Arts) in Berlin, where he founded r42, which slowly became a web agency with a nice portfolio of companies, working in the financial, industrial, and leisure sectors and a few non-profit organizations. For years, Ralph had a soft spot for data visualization, which he planned to center his professional career around. Since 2018 or thereabouts, he has been doing just that, designing and coding data visualizations, and he is now working with Supermetrics on the implementation of the first commercial Looker Studio chart library, a collection of data visualizations that allow you to push the limits of Looker Studio.