How to Create Tabs in Looker Dashboard

A cluttered dashboard is an unused dashboard. When your charts and tables are all crammed onto one screen, it's easy for your audience (and even you) to get overwhelmed and miss the key insights. Luckily, Looker Studio has a simple but powerful feature to bring order to your reports: pages, which function just like tabs in a spreadsheet. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create, manage, and customize tabs to build professional, easy-to-navigate dashboards your team will actually love to use.

Why Use Tabs in Your Looker Studio Dashboards?

Before diving into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." Organizing your report into tabs isn't just about aesthetics, it's about making your data more accessible and impactful.

• Better Organization: Break down a complex, all-in-one report into logical sections. For instance, a single marketing report can be split into tabs for "Performance Overview," "Google Ads," "SEO Traffic," and "Social Media."
• Improved User Experience: Instead of forcing users to scroll endlessly, tabs guide them through a clear, organized story. This helps stakeholders find the exact information they need without getting lost in a sea of visualizations.
• Focused Storytelling: Each tab can be dedicated to answering a specific set of questions. For example, a Google Analytics report could have an "Audience" tab answering who is visiting, an "Acquisition" tab for where they're coming from, and a "Behavior" tab for what they do on the site.
• Easier Maintenance: Managing or updating a section of your report is much simpler when it’s neatly contained on its own page. You can modify the "Paid Search" tab without worrying about accidentally moving an element on the "Organic Search" tab.

Understanding Looker Studio Navigation: Pages are Tabs

In Looker Studio, what you might think of as "tabs" are officially called "Pages." It's functionally the same thing. Each page you create in your report becomes a navigable tab for anyone viewing the dashboard.

When you're in Edit Mode, you'll see your page management controls in the top toolbar. It will look something like "Page 1 of 1," with options to add new pages and navigate between them. This control panel is the heart of your report's structure.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Add & Manage Tabs

Ready to build? Let’s create a structured, multi-tabbed report from scratch. Open any Looker Studio report (or start a new one) and make sure you are in Edit Mode.

1. Adding a New Page (Tab)

In the top left of the editor toolbar, you’ll see the page navigator. To add your first new tab, simply click the Add a page button.

That's it! A new, blank page will be created, and you’ll see the navigator update to "Page 2 of 2." You've officially created a tab.

2. Renaming Your Pages

"Page 1" and "Page 2" aren't very descriptive. Giving your tabs clear, meaningful names is essential for good navigation.

1. In the page navigator, click the three vertical dots (⋮) next to the page list. This will open the Page management menu.
2. Hover over the page you want to rename (e.g., "Page 1").
3. Click the three dots (⋮) that appear next to that specific page's name and select Rename.
4. Type a new name, like "Executive Summary," and hit Enter.

Repeat this process for all your pages. Good names might be "Website Traffic Overview," "Conversion Funnel," or "Sales Performance."

3. Reordering Your Pages

The order of your tabs should tell a logical story. You might want a high-level overview first, followed by more granular deep-dives.

To change the order, simply click on the page list in the toolbar, then click and drag a page's name up or down in the list to its desired position.

4. Duplicating Pages for Consistency

Here’s a major time-saving tip: if you want your tabs to have the same header, footer, corporate logo, and general layout, don't build each page from scratch. Instead, create a template page first and then duplicate it.

1. Design your first page with all the common elements you want on every other page (like logos, headers, or a date range filter).
2. Open the Page management menu again (the three dots next to the page list).
3. Find your template page, click the three-dot menu next to it, and select Duplicate.
4. A new page will be created with the exact same layout and elements, ready for you to add the specific charts for that section.

Customizing Your Dashboard’s Navigation Style

Looker Studio gives you a few different ways to display your page navigation. You can choose the one that best fits your report's content and your audience's preferences.

1. In the main toolbar at the top, click on Theme and layout.
2. A panel will open on the right. Click the Layout tab.
3. Look for the Navigation type section.

Here are your choices and when to use them:

Tabs

This is the default and most common option. It displays the page names as classic tabs across the top of the report, just below the header. It's clean, familiar, and works perfectly for dashboards with a manageable number of tabs (say, 2 to 7).

Left

This option turns your navigation into a clickable sidebar on the left side of your dashboard. This is an excellent choice for reports that have many sections (8+ pages), as you can fit more page titles in the sidebar than you can across the top. It also gives your dashboard a more modern, app-like feel.

None

Choosing "None" hides the built-in navigation menu entirely in View Mode. This isn't usually recommended, but it has specific use cases. You might use it if you want to embed a single, specific dashboard page on a website without allowing users to navigate away. Or, for advanced users, you could build your own "Table of Contents" page with custom navigation links that jump to other pages.

Advanced Tips for Professional-Looking Tabs

Once you've mastered the basics, use these pro tips to elevate your dashboards.

Make Key Elements "Report-Level"

Do you have a date range filter, a company logo, or a title that should appear on every single page? Instead of copying and pasting it onto each new page, make it a report-level element.

Simply right-click the on-page element (like a filter or a logo) and select Make report-level from the dropdown menu. Now, that object will appear in the exact same spot on all of your report's pages. This not only saves an immense amount of time but also ensures perfect consistency.

Create a Homepage or "Table of Contents"

For exceptionally complex reports, your first tab can serve as a central navigation hub.

1. On your first page, use Text boxes to create titles for your key report sections.
2. Click on a text box and look for the Insert link option in the properties panel on the right.
3. You can have this link to other pages within your report, essentially creating a custom main menu for your users. This works best when you set the main Navigation type to "None."

Use Icons and Good Naming Conventions

Clarity is everything. Always give your tabs short, descriptive names that make sense at a glance. "PPC_Data_v2" is a bad name, "Paid Campaign Performance" is a good name.

If you're using the Left navigation style, you can also add icons to each page. In the Page management menu, click the three dots next to a page and select Icon. Adding a simple, relevant icon makes the navigation menu much faster to scan and visually appealing.

Final Thoughts

By organizing your dashboards into logical pages with clear navigation, you transform a potentially chaotic data dump into a professional, user-friendly report. Breaking content into tabs makes it easier for your audience to consume, understand, and ultimately act on the insights you've worked so hard to uncover.

While Looker Studio makes this fundamentally easy, the process of manually setting up new pages, duplicating formats, and ensuring every filter is report-level still takes time and dozens of clicks. At Graphed, we’ve found a way to automate this entire process. Instead of building visually and organizationally complex reports by hand, you can just ask our AI to do it for you using plain English. For instance, ask, “Create a sales dashboard showing pipeline stages, deal velocity by rep, and our top lead sources for this quarter,” and our system instantly generates a comprehensive, multi-view report, pulling all the live data for you in seconds. You get the insights without the friction of endless clicking, so you can spend your time analyzing data, not arranging it.