How to use the menu and controls in Looker Studio

If it is your first time using Looker and you still don't know the tool very well and all the features available in it, here is a guide for you.

Looker Studio is a platform that transforms your digital marketing data into visually stunning and customizable dashboards, offering you, and your clients, enhanced clarity and insights. Although it is pretty intuitive it might take a while to learn how to use some of its options or controls. With this article, we want to help you use Looker Studio so that you can start impressing your customers with your dashboards in no time!

Menu options

Rename the report

First of all, it's good to know that by clicking on the report name you can change it at any time.

Basic options

At the beginning of the row of options, we find the basic ones.

Basic options

• The arrow pointing to the left indicates undo the last action.
• The arrow pointing to the right indicates the redo of the last action.
• The mouse pointer is the selection mode, this option is selected by default.
• The magnifier is the zoom button.

Looker Studio options

Looker options

• Add page: Will add a new blank page to your report.
• Add data: Here is where you can add Dataslayer data sources to your report. Don't forget to allow all permission while adding it.

• Add a chart: Here is where you can add elements to your dashboards. There is a wide variety of charts to choose from so that you can make your reports as you like. You can also customize them.

• Community visualizations and components: These are charts done by external developers.

• Add a control: Here you can add controls and filters to your report. We will talk more about controls later in this article.

Additional options

Additional options
 

• URL Embed: With this option, you can add a link, and it will show either the web page, image, or anything that corresponds to that link.
• Image: Here you can add an image by a URL or from your computer,
• Text: It will add a text box. You will be able to change the text properties as you like.
• Line: You can add lines to decorate, or relate one thing to another using arrows.
• Shape: You can add rectangles or circles to decorate.
• Theme and layout: Here you can add a theme to your reports. You can also extract a theme for an image, customize one theme using your company colors, and configure the layout, such as the view mode or canvas size.

Theme setup

Controls

With the controls option, you can add controls to filter your data, making your report more interactive, and selecting just the data you want to see at that moment in a faster way.

There are several options:

• Drop-down list
• Fixed-sized list
• Input box
• Advanced filter
• Slider
• Checkbox
• Preset filter
• Date range control
• Data control
• Button

Let's see the most common ones:

Drop-down list and Fixed-sized list 

These controls display a drop-down or fixed-sized list of options that you can select to filter your report depending on the dimension you have assigned to the control.

Date Range

This control is a widget of a calendar that allows you to adjust the time range of the report without having to edit the settings. In this way, viewers have the ability to select the dates they want to see.

You can select the date range on the widget or on the setup of the widget

Also, you can add the range by clicking on the dates or by selecting one of the ranges offered by the calendar.

 

That would cover the basics, I hope you found this overview of the Looker Studio interface useful.

 

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us via our live chat on our website or via e-mail if you still have doubts or questions. We are happy to help!