Looker Studio for Beginners

Every month you open the spreadsheet, filter it to the right period, copy the figures into a summary, make a chart, screenshot it, and send it — with a small nagging doubt that you filtered something differently this time. Then you do it again next month. And the people who need the numbers still cannot read the spreadsheet without you sitting beside them. This is a plain, practical guide to Looker Studio: connecting to the data you already keep, and turning it into a dashboard that updates itself and that somebody else can actually understand. It is written for someone comfortable with a spreadsheet who is not an analyst. Every term is explained in plain language the first time it appears. It is also honest that a good deal of this book is about your data rather than your charts, because that is where the difficulty actually lives. Inside: - Why a spreadsheet and a report are two different jobs, and what happens when one tool does both - Getting messy data into the shape a reporting tool expects — the chapter everyone wants to skip - Connecting a source and fixing the field types before they cause confusion - Building your first report in layers: headline, trend, breakdown, detail - Choosing a chart by the comparison your viewer needs to make - Filters, date ranges, and controls that let people explore without breaking anything - Calculated fields taught by reasoning, including the percentage mistake that produces wrong numbers - Designing for a stranger, sharing without exposing too much, and diagnosing figures that look wrong The interface changes regularly, so this book teaches what to build and why, and sends you to current documentation for the clicks. Stop rebuilding the same summary. Send a link that is already current.