Preface

Organizations and individuals are increasingly relying on data to make important decisions. Presenting data visually makes it easier to interpret and analyze. Google Looker Studio is an easy-to-use and collaborative tool that helps you explore your data and transform it into beautiful visualizations. With Looker Studio, you can build and share dashboards that help monitor key performance indicators, identify patterns, and generate insights that ultimately drive decisions and actions.

The goals of this book are threefold: first, provide foundational know-how on basic design and visualization principles, second, offer a practical and demystified guide on using Looker Studio for visualizing data, and third, give a walk-through of the structured dashboard building process and the various deliberations involved in it. Data Storytelling with Google Looker Studio begins with laying out the foundational design principles and guidelines that are essential to creating accurate, effective, and compelling data visualizations. We then delve into the features and capabilities of Looker Studio – from the basic to the advanced – and showcase their application with examples. The book then takes you through the process of building dashboards with a structured three-stage process called the 3-D approach using real-world examples. The approach involves determining the objectives and needs of the dashboard, designing its key components and layout, and developing each element of the dashboard. These examples take you through the thought process of various design and implementation considerations.

Reports and dashboards are two forms of presenting data visuals together. They fundamentally serve different purposes and differ in terms of level of detail, interactivity, breadth and so on. However, for all practical purposes of this book, the distinction between the two doesn't matter too much. Hence, I use the terms report and dashboard interchangeably through much of this book. In cases where the distinction makes a difference to the topic discussed, I call that out specifically.

All through the writing of this book, right up to its publication, the tool we used was called “Data Studio.” Google announced the rebranding of the tool as “Looker Studio” on October 11, 2022, which reflected on the tool itself as well as the associated documentation and support pages almost instantaneously, or so it seemed.

Google acquired Looker, the new-age enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) and data analytics platform, in 2019. With its logical semantic layer, in-database architecture, API and developer-friendly capabilities, Looker provides a powerful platform to meet enterprise business intelligence needs. Looker became part of the Google Cloud offerings, and it complemented the existing free Data Studio tool. Together, the two business intelligence tools provided flexibility and choice to the users.

The rebranding is part of a strategy to consolidate all Google Cloud's business intelligence services under the Looker brand. The Data Studio tool itself remains the same, and there is no change in its capabilities and features as a result of this. From a UI standpoint, only the logo is changed. Also, the product is still free. Google has introduced a new premium tier to Looker Studio, called Looker Studio Pro, with additional capabilities and support that cater to enterprise teams.

This book is only limited to the free Looker Studio (formerly, Data Studio) tool and does not touch upon any enterprise capabilities of the Pro version of Looker Studio or the Looker platform. While an attempt is made to use the new name - Looker Studio - as much as possible throughout the book, screenshots and images mostly reflect the old name and logo.

A big part of this strategic move by Google is the strong integration between Looker Studio and the Looker Platform. Looker enables you to create semantic models of your data by defining relationships between data sets, creating metrics, and encapsulating business logic. With the new Looker connector, you can connect to your Looker models from Looker Studio and visualize the data, without you needing to build the relationships, creating metrics, or formatting fields within Looker Studio. While the connector is free, you need a valid license and appropriate permissions to the Looker Platform to connect. Looker is in turn very deeply integrated with BigQuery. Looker by itself does not store any data. It connects to the data stored in BigQuery, and provides a logical layer on top of it to meet the data exploration, analytical, and reporting needs of the users. It thus leverages the powerful analytical capabilities of BigQuery. The Looker platform has its own visualization layer, which is complementary to Looker Studio. As a BI enthusiast, I'm very excited about this direction that Google has taken with its BI portfolio and I will closely follow its evolution - you should too.

Who this book is for

If you are a beginner or an aspiring data analyst looking to understand the core concepts of data visualization and you want to use Google Looker Studio for creating effective dashboards, this book is for you. No specific prior knowledge is required to benefit from this book.

If you are a more experienced data analyst or business intelligence developer, you will find this book useful as a detailed guide to using Looker Studio as well as a refresher of the core dashboarding concepts.

If you are a business professional looking to build reports and run analyses on your own, this book empowers you with the knowledge and skills you need to visualize data effectively using the simple and easy-to-use tool Looker Studio.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Storytelling, introduces the concept of data storytelling, its format, and its manifestation in dashboards and reports.

Chapter 2, Principles of Data Visualization, covers foundational principles and guidelines that enable the creation of effective and compelling data visualizations.

Chapter 3, Visualizing Looker Effectively, describes some common chart types and their applications along with pitfalls to avoid.

Chapter 4, Google Looker Studio Overview, gets you started with Looker Studio and describes how to work with and manage key entities such as data sources, reports, and explorerss.

Chapter 5, Looker Studio Report Designer, examines key report designer options, settings, and elements such as report theme, pages, filter controls, styling, and more that help design reports in Looker Studio.

Chapter 6, Looker Studio Built-In Charts, reviews the built-in charts provided by Looker Studio and their configurations.

Chapter 7, Looker Studio Features, Beyond Basics, covers advanced features such as calculated fields, parameters, blending, report templates, community visualizations, and report optimization.

Chapter 8, Employee Turnover Analysis, walks you through building a detailed report analyzing employee turnover for a fictious company using the 3-D approach: Determine, Design, and Develop.

Chapter 9, Mortgage Complaints Analysis, walks you through building a dashboard for monitoring mortgage-related complaints received by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a US agency, using the 3-D approach.

Chapter 10, Customer Churn Analysis, walks you through building a dashboard to analyze the customer churn phenomenon for a broadband service company using the 3-D approach.

Chapter 11, Monitoring Looker Studio Report Usage, describes how to track and monitor usage of Looker Studio reports using Google Analytics.

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.

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.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Data-Storytelling-with-Google-Data-Studio. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/5u31Q.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “BigQuery provides this information as part of the census_bureau_acs public dataset.”

A block of code is set as follows:

CREATE TABLE `datastudio-343704.data_viz.baseball_schedule`
AS
SELECT * FROM `bigquery-public-data.baseball.schedules

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “The SETUP tab is where you choose the appropriate data source and add different fields – dimensions and metrics that make up the chart.”

Tips or important notes

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