How to Create a Report in Looker

Creating your first report in Looker can feel like a tall order, but it’s one of the most powerful ways for your team to standardize how you view and talk about your data. This article will walk you through building a report from scratch, starting with the fundamentals and moving step-by-step from a single data query to a complete, shareable dashboard.

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First, Let's Understand Looker's Core Concepts

Before jumping into the step-by-step instructions, it’s helpful to understand the language Looker uses. Unlike simpler reporting tools where you just drag and drop metrics, Looker has a unique structure that makes its reports so reliable and powerful. Grasping these few terms will make the whole process much clearer.

LookML: The Foundation of Your Data

You may hear the term “LookML” mentioned often. LookML is the proprietary language Looker uses to define your data. Your data team or a developer uses LookML to create a logical model of your company’s database. They define things like dimensions (the “what”), measures (the “how many”), calculations, and the relationships between different data tables.

Essentially, the LookML model acts as a single source of truth for your organization. You don’t need to know how to write it, but it's good to know that all your reporting is built on this governed, pre-defined foundation. This is what prevents two people from pulling the “same” report with two different numbers.

Explores: Your Starting Point for Analysis

An "Explore" is the user-friendly starting point for building any report. It's a curated view of your data created from the LookML model, designed for a specific type of analysis. For example, your company might have Explores like "User Data," "Order Details," or "Website Traffic." When you want to answer a question, you’ll start by choosing the most relevant Explore.

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Looks: A Single, Saved Visualization

A "Look" is a single piece of reporting - like one chart, one table, or a single KPI number - that you save. Think of a Look as the answer to a single, specific business question, such as “What were our total sales by product category last month?” or “How many new users signed up each day this quarter?”

Dashboards: Your Complete Report

A "Dashboard" is where everything comes together. It’s a collection of one or more Looks arranged together on a single screen. This is what most people consider a "report." A sales dashboard, for instance, might include a Look showing overall revenue, another showing sales by representative, and a third visualizing the sales pipeline over time.

How to Create Your First Report in Looker: A Step-by-Step Guide

With the core concepts covered, let’s build a report. For this example, let's imagine we're on a marketing team and we want to build a simple report showing website sessions by traffic source over the last 90 days.

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Part 1: Building a "Look"

Step 1: Choose an Explore

First, log in to Looker and navigate to the Explore section from the main menu. You will see a list of available data models. Since we want to analyze website traffic, we'll choose the "Website Analytics" or similarly named Explore.

Step 2: Select Your Dimensions and Measures

You'll now see the Explore interface. On the left side is a panel with all the available fields, organized into groups. Fields are categorized as either Dimensions or Measures.

• Dimensions: These are descriptive, non-numeric fields you can group by. Think of them as the attributes of your data, like "Traffic Source," "Country," "Device Type," or "Date."
• Measures: These are the quantitative, numeric values you want to calculate. They are often aggregates like "Count," "Sum," or "Average." Examples include "Session Count," "Total Revenue," or "Average Time on Page."

For our report, we will select:

• From the Dimensions, we’ll find a "Date" field (let’s use "Session Date") and "Traffic Source."
• From the Measures, we’ll choose "Session Count."

As you click on these fields, they will appear in the main "Data" section of your screen. Looker is building a query for you in the background.

Step 3: Filter Your Data

Right now, your query is likely pulling all your session data from the beginning of time. We need to filter it down to our desired timeframe. Find the "Filters" section at the top.

Click inside the Filters box and select the "Session Date" dimension. Then, set the conditions. Let's choose "is in the past" and set it to "90 days." You can use many types of filters here, like filtering for specific traffic sources (e.g., "Traffic Source is equal to google") or excluding certain data points.

Step 4: Run the Query and Visualize It

Once you have your dimensions, measures, and filters set, click the Run button in the top-right corner. The Data table will populate with the results: three columns showing the date, the traffic source, and the number of sessions for each.

Now, let’s turn this table into a chart. Click the Visualization tab.

Looker provides many chart options - Bar, Column, Line, Area, Pie, Maps, and more. A line chart is perfect for showing a trend over time. Select the "Line" chart option. Looker will automatically plot "Session Date" on the X-axis and "Session Count" on the Y-axis, creating separate lines for each "Traffic Source."

Step 5: Save as a Look

Your chart looks great! It's time to save it as a Look so you can use it again later. Click the gear icon in the top right and select Save... then As a new Look.... Give it a clear, descriptive name like "Sessions by Source - Last 90 Days" and save it to your personal or a shared folder.

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Part 2: Building a Dashboard

Now that you have a saved Look, you can add it to a dashboard. Let's create a new dashboard for our marketing team.

Step 1: Create a New Dashboard

Navigate to the folder where you want your dashboard to live (e.g., your team's shared folder). Click the New button at the top and select Dashboard. Give your dashboard a name, such as "Marketing Performance Overview."

Step 2: Add Your Look as a Tile

You’ll be taken to a blank dashboard in "Edit Mode." Click Add or Add Tile from the top bar.

A window will pop up asking what you want to add. Choose Look (or "Visualization from an Explore"). Navigate to the folder where you saved your "Sessions by Source - Last 90 Days" Look and select it. The chart will appear on your dashboard as a "tile."

Step 3: Arrange and Resize Tiles

You can drag the tile around the canvas and resize it by grabbing the bottom-right corner. For a comprehensive report, you would repeat this process, creating and adding more Looks. For example, you might add:

• A bar chart showing "Top 10 Landing Pages"
• A single value visualization showing "Total goal completions"
• A map visualization showing "Users by Country"

Arrange these tiles logically to tell a clear story about your marketing performance.

Step 4: Make Your Dashboard Interactive with Filters

This is one of Looker's most powerful features. Instead of being stuck with the "Last 90 Days" filter from your original Look, you can add dashboard-level filters that control all tiles at once.

While in Edit Mode, click Add, then Filter. Let's add a "Date" filter. The configuration panel will appear. Give it a title, choose the field to filter on (e.g., "Session Date"), and link it to the tiles on your dashboard. Now, users viewing the dashboard can change the date range from 90 days to 7 days, or any custom range, and all the connected charts will update automatically.

Tips for Creating Effective Looker Reports

• Start with a Question: Don’t dive into an Explore and start clicking randomly. Before you build, clearly define the question you are trying to answer. This will guide your creation process and lead to a more effective report.
• Keep Visualizations Simple: A cluttered chart is an unreadable one. Focus on clarity over complexity. A simple line or bar chart is often far more effective at communicating information than a complicated scatterplot with too many dimensions.
• Take Advantage of Scheduled Deliveries: Help your stakeholders stay informed without requiring them to log in to Looker. You can schedule any dashboard or Look to be emailed to a list of recipients on a recurring basis (e.g., every Monday at 9 AM).
• Document Everything: Use Looker's text tiles to add titles, descriptions, and notes to your dashboards. Explain what each chart shows, where the data comes from, and what the key takeaways are. This context turns a collection of charts into a strategic report.

Final Thoughts

Building a report in Looker is a systematic journey of starting with a question, using Explores to craft single visualizations called Looks, and grouping them into a comprehensive story with a dashboard. Once you get the hang of an Explore's dimensions, measures, and filters, you unlock the ability to answer complex business questions with trusted, reliable data.

The time spent learning flows and terminology for powerful but complex BI tools is often a major hurdle for teams needing fast answers. We built Graphed to cut through that complexity. By simply connecting your data sources, you can ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing website sessions by source for the last 90 days" - and get a finished, real-time dashboard built for you in seconds, not hours.