How to Make a Chart in Looker

Building a chart in Looker (now part of Google Cloud) is one of the most fundamental tasks for anyone working with data. While the platform is incredibly powerful, its interface can feel a bit overwhelming if you're new. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, helping you go from raw data to a clean, useful visualization without the guesswork.

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Navigating Looker: A Quick Orientation

Before you build your first chart, it helps to understand the three core building blocks you’ll be working with inside Looker. Think of them as the ingredients for your data recipe.

• Explores: An Explore is a curated dataset that serves as the starting point for any query. Your data team sets these up to make analysis easier. For example, you might have an "Orders" Explore for sales data, a "Users" Explore for customer data, or a "Website Traffic" Explore with data from Google Analytics. Think of it as choosing the general topic you want to investigate.
• Dimensions: Dimensions are the fields that describe your data - the "who," "what," "where," and "when." These are typically text-based or date fields that you can group by. Examples include things like User Country, Product Category, Order Date, or Traffic Source.
• Measures: Measures are the quantifiable, numeric fields you want to calculate - the "how much" or "how many." They represent aggregations like sums, counts, or averages. Typical examples include Total Sales, Number of Users, Average Order Value, or Order Count.

In short: you pick an Explore to start, select Dimensions to group your data, and choose Measures to count or calculate it.

Step-by-Step: Building Your First Chart in Looker

Let's build a simple but common chart: a bar chart showing the number of users by country. This is a great way to understand the basic workflow you'll use to create almost any visualization in Looker.

Step 1: Choose Your Starting Point (The Explore)

Your journey begins in the "Explore" section. You can usually find this in the main navigation menu on the left side of your screen. When you click it, you’ll see a list of available Explores your company has set up.

For our example, we want to analyze user data, so we'll look for an Explore named something like "Users," "Website Visitors," or similar. Click on it to open the query builder interface.

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Step 2: Select Your Data (Dimensions and Measures)

Once you’re in the Explore, you’ll see a left-hand sidebar containing all available Dimensions and Measures, neatly organized into groups. This is where you pick your ingredients.

To see users by country, you need to tell Looker two things:

1. How to group the data: We want to see data grouped by country. Find the "User" dimension group, and click on the Country dimension.
2. What to count: We want to know the number of users. Find a measure like User Count or Number of Users and click on it.

As you click on each field, Looker adds it to the report builder. Dimensions typically have a dark gray background, and measures have a light blue one, helping you easily distinguish between them.

Step 3: Run Your Query

So far, you’ve only told Looker what you want to see. To actually retrieve the data, you need to run the query. Find the prominent Run button, usually located in the top-right corner, and click it.

Looker will query your database and, in a few moments, display the results as a data table in the main part of the screen. You should now see two columns: one for "Country" and one for "User Count," with a row for each country found in your data. Seeing the raw data table first is a great way to confirm you’ve selected the right fields before you start visualizing.

Step 4: Choose Your Visualization

Now for the fun part. Above the data table, you’ll see a "Visualization" tab. Click on it. Looker will often try to pick a default chart type for you, but you can easily change it.

You'll see a row of icons representing different chart types. For our user-by-country data, a bar chart is a perfect choice. Here’s a quick guide on common chart types:

• Bar/Column Chart: Excellent for comparing categories, like sales by product or users by country.
• Line Chart: Ideal for showing trends over time, like daily revenue or weekly website sessions.
• Pie Chart: Use cautiously for showing parts of a whole when you have only a few categories, like traffic sources split.
• Scatter Plot: Great for showing the relationship between two different numeric variables.
• Table: The default view, perfect for displaying precise numbers and detailed information.

Click the Bar Chart icon. Instantly, your data table will transform into a visual chart, with countries on one axis and the user count on the other.

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Step 5: Customize Your Chart

A default chart is good, but a well-customized chart is much better. Looker gives you a ton of control over the look and feel of your visualization. Click the Edit button next to the Visualization tab to open the formatting panel.

Here are some of the most common and useful adjustments you can make:

• Plot: This tab lets you customize the overall chart style. For a column chart, you can choose between a grouped or stacked layout if you have multiple measures.
• Series: Here, you can change the colors of your data series, adjust their labels, and even change the chart type for a specific series in a combination chart.
• Values: This tab is great for making your chart more readable. You can add Value Labels to display the exact numbers directly on the chart bars, so your audience doesn't have to guess.
• X-Axis & Y-Axis: These tabs allow you to control everything about your chart’s axes. You can edit the axis names (e.g., change 'Users_Count' to 'Number of Users'), adjust the font size, and customize the scale. Giving your axes clear, readable titles is one of the quickest ways to make your chart more professional.

Take a few minutes to explore these options. Something as simple as adding value labels and providing a cleaner axis title can make a huge difference in clarity.

Advanced Tips for Better Looker Charts

Once you've mastered the basics, you can start using some of Looker's more powerful features to dig deeper into your data.

Using Filters to Refine Your Data

Often, you don't want to analyze all of your data at once. You might want to see user data from the last 90 days, or sales data for just a specific product. Filters let you do just that.

Above your data, you’ll find a "Filters" section. To add a filter:

1. Select the dimension or measure you want to filter by from your fields list (e.g., Created Date).
2. After selecting it, click the "Filter" button that appears when you hover over the field name.
3. This adds the field to the Filters section at the top. Here, you can set the conditions, such as "is in the last 90 days" for a date filter, or "is equal to Canada" for a country filter.
4. Click Run again to apply the filter. Your chart and data table will update to show only the matching data.

Pivoting Data for Deeper Insights

Pivoting is an incredibly useful - but sometimes confusing - feature. It allows you to turn the values from one of your dimensions into column headers. This is perfect for comparing a measure across two different dimensions at once.

Let's say you want to see your monthly order count broken down by product category. You would select three fields:

• Dimension: Order Created Month
• Dimension: Product Category
• Measure: Order Count

To pivot this data, find the Product Category dimension in your field list and click the pivot icon (it looks like a right-facing arrow). Now, click Run. Instead of a long table, you’ll see a much cleaner one where each product category ('Shirts', 'Pants', 'Accessories') gets its own column, with the order counts for each month listed in the rows. This is brilliant for building stacked bar charts or comparing performance across categories side-by-side.

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Adding Your Chart to a Dashboard

A chart on its own is useful, but its true power is realized when it's part of a dashboard alongside other key metrics. To save your beautiful new chart, click the gear icon in the top right corner of the Explore.

You have a few options:

• Save as a Look: A "Look" is simply a saved chart or report. You can save it for personal use or share it with your team.
• Save to Dashboard: This is the most common goal. You can choose to add your chart to an existing dashboard or create a new one right from the save dialog. Give your chart a title, and voila, it’s now a tile on your dashboard that will update automatically.

Final Thoughts

You now have a solid foundation for creating, customizing, and sharing visualizations in Looker. The process of starting with an Explore, picking dimensions and measures, visualizing the results, and applying filters is the core workflow you'll use constantly. While it takes practice, this methodical approach gives you granular control over your data analysis.

Of course, stepping through menus and manually selecting fields, dimensions, measures, and chart settings isn’t always the fastest way to get an answer. Sometimes, you just want to know "What were our total sales from Facebook Ads last month compared to Google Ads?" At Graphed, we’ve made that possible. We connect directly to your data sources and allow you to ask questions in plain English, instantly building the charts and dashboards you need without you having to navigate complex BI tools. It's the ideal way to get data-driven insights in seconds, not hours. You can either build your charts manually, one click at a time in Looker - or you can simply ask for them to receive an answer in real-time.