Introduction
Looker Studio, formerly known as Data Studio, represents a Google product designed to empower businesses in creating dashboards for visualizing their data. This tool holds so many features that you can easily lose more time in creating your dashboard rather than its analysis. This article will give you the best practices to avoid losing time on the creation of your dashboard.
In Looker Studio, we get easily lost in all the features that we can use to create our dashboards. Here are the best practices and tips to avoid losing (too much) time on your dashboards.
1. Use ‘current report/page settings’ to make your life easier
One good tip to know on Looker Studio is that when you select two charts, you cannot add bulk filters, which can be annoying if you have to update a hundred scorecards and make you waste your time. To avoid this hassle, you should use the ‘page filter’, a filter that will be applied to all your charts on your page. If you use the same filters on your entire report, then, you can also use the ‘report filter’.
If you want to apply this filter, click right on your page, then select ‘Current page settings’, and you will find in the column ‘setup’ the ‘page filter’, which you can create depending on the conditions you want to apply.
In case there is a chart that needs another filtering, you can always go to the settings of the charts, and you can untoggle the ‘inherit filter’ so the page filter isn’t applied.
2. Use ‘make report level’ to put your item on all pages
If you have to put your logo for instance at the top left of all the pages of your dashboard, you can easily do so by clicking right on the item you want to duplicate on each page, and clicking on ‘Make report-level’.
3. Use ‘align horizontally/vertically’ to quickly align your charts
Is there anything more annoying than scorecards that are not aligned? To avoid having to pull our hair, you can select all the items you want to align, click right, and select ‘align horizontally’, ‘align vertically’, or ‘distribute’.
4. Use ‘Resize column’ to resize your columns in one click
The same goes for the tables for which the columns are not aligned. Once again, there exists a trick to not change the size manually. For that, select a table, click right, and select ‘resize columns’. You can either ‘fit it to data’ or ‘distribute evenly’ the columns.
5. Adapt the data type of your metrics in your data source
If you use a metric from your data source (for instance ‘amount spent’ in Meta) in several tables, you might have encountered the issue of having to change the data type (from numeric to currency) on each of your tables or scorecards.
To get around this, you can adapt the data type of your metric in the dashboard so it will directly apply the correct data type. To do so, go to your Data Source settings and find the metric you want to adapt. For instance, take ‘amount spent’, and on the column ‘type’ there is a dropdown list with all the different types you can use, and you can change it to ‘currency - EUR €’ for instance.
Conclusion
There still exist many tools and features in Looker Studio that can help you improve your dashboards and also reduce the time to spend on them, but these are already a great start to reducing issues that you might face while building your dashboard.
Amy Mossay
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