How to Change Page Size in Looker Studio

Setting up a new Looker Studio report often starts with the default blank canvas, which works fine for a quick analysis but rarely fits the final format you need. Whether you're creating a printable report, an embeddable dashboard for your website, or a widescreen display for a TV monitor, mastering the page size settings is fundamental. This guide walks you through a few simple clicks that give you complete control over your report's dimensions and layout.

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We'll cover how to find and adjust the canvas size, explain what each display mode does, and provide practical examples for common scenarios like creating A4 reports or long, scrollable webpages.

Why Customizing Your Page Size Matters

Before diving into the “how,” it helps to understand the “why.” The dimensions of your report canvas directly impact the user experience and the clarity of your data storytelling. An ill-fitting dashboard can lead to frustrating scrollbars, cramped visualizations, or tiny text that’s impossible to read.

Here’s why taking a moment to adjust the page size is a critical first step:

• Match the Destination: A report destined for a PDF in a board meeting needs to be formatted for a standard paper size like A4 or Letter. A dashboard embedded on a company wiki needs to fit within a specific website container. A KPI screen on the office wall requires a 16:9 aspect ratio to fill the display properly.
• Improve Readability: By controlling the canvas size, you can ensure there is enough whitespace between your charts and tables. A wider canvas can accommodate more columns in a table without horizontal scrolling, and a taller canvas lets you build long, narrative-style reports that users can scroll through naturally.
• Eliminate Unnecessary Scrolling: The default display mode sometimes forces both horizontal and vertical scrollbars on the user, making it difficult to get a complete view of the data. By adjusting the size and display mode, you can create a seamless viewing experience tailored to the device.
• Create "Long-form" Dashboards: Sometimes a single screen isn't enough to tell the whole story. By setting a custom canvas height that is several thousand pixels tall, you can create a “scrollytelling” experience, guiding the user through a data narrative from top to bottom.

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How to Find and Change Canvas Size in Looker Studio

You can access the sizing and layout controls for any page in your report from the right-hand properties panel. When you first open a report, this panel usually shows options for a selected chart. To see the page-level settings, you just need to make sure no specific element is selected.

Simply click on the blank canvas area of your report. As soon as you do, the properties panel on the right will switch to show Current Page Settings.

Within this panel, you’ll see two main tabs: LAYOUT and STYLE. The settings we need are all under the LAYOUT tab.

Understanding the Key Layout Settings

Inside the LAYOUT tab, you'll find the "Canvas Size" section. This is where you control the dimensions and responsive behavior of your report page. Let's break down the most important options.

1. Canvas Size Presets

Looker Studio gives you a handful of presets designed for common use cases. Clicking the dropdown menu gives you these options:

• Screen (16:9): With a default size of 1200x675 pixels, this is perfect for modern widescreen displays, like presentations or wall-mounted TVs.
• Screen (4:3): An older screen format (1000x750 pixels) that might be useful if you know your audience is using older monitors or projectors.
• US Letter (Portrait/Landscape): Formats the canvas to the standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper size, which is ideal if you plan to print the report or save it as a PDF for stakeholders in the US.
• A4 (Portrait/Landscape): This formats the canvas for the standard A4 paper size used in most other parts of the world.
• Custom: This is where you unlock full control. By selecting 'Custom', you can manually enter any width and height in pixels.

2. Display Mode

This setting is arguably just as important as the canvas dimensions. It tells Looker Studio how to handle situations where your report's canvas size doesn't perfectly match the viewer's browser window size. You have a few options here:

• Fit to window: This mode will scale your entire report, both width and height, to fit within the available browser window, all while maintaining the aspect ratio you set. It ensures nothing is ever cut off, but on very large screens, your elements might look smaller, surrounded by empty space.
• Fit to width: This is one of the most useful modes. It scales the report's width to always match the width of the viewer's screen, eliminating any horizontal scrollbars. If the report content is taller than the screen, it introduces a vertical scrollbar. This is the perfect setting for long, scrollable dashboards.
• Actual size: This mode displays the report at the exact pixel dimensions you set in the canvas size. If the canvas is larger than the viewer's screen, they will have to use both horizontal and vertical scrollbars to see everything. This is best for situations where you need pixel-perfect layout control and don't want any automatic scaling.

3. Other Settings (Margin, Header, Footer)

Below the canvas controls, you can set a margin to add padding around your page, choose whether a header or footer is always visible or auto hides, and set their size. The header and footer are useful for adding a title, logo, or page numbers that remain on screen even when the user scrolls.

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Practical Examples for Common Use Cases

Let's put this knowledge into practice with a few step-by-step examples.

Example 1: Create a Printable A4-Sized Monthly Report

Imagine you need to send a one-page summary to your team at the end of each month. Your goal is a clean, printable A4 PDF.

1. Click on the blank part of your report canvas to open the Current Page Settings panel.
2. Navigate to the LAYOUT tab.
3. In the Canvas Size dropdown, select A4 (Portrait).
4. Looker Studio will automatically set the dimensions to 827 x 1169 pixels.
5. Next, in Display Mode, choosing Fit to Window or Actual Size often works best for PDFs. This ensures that when someone views the PDF, it scales properly to one page.
6. Pro tip: Go to View > Snap to > Grid from the top menu. This helps you align your charts and scorecards perfectly, giving the final document a professional, organized look.

Example 2: Build a Long, Scrollable Dashboard for a Website

Let's say you want to embed a comprehensive marketing performance dashboard on an internal webpage. You want users to be able to scroll down through an overview, channel performance, and regional breakdowns.

1. In the LAYOUT tab's Canvas Size dropdown, select Custom.
2. Keep the width at a reasonable size for a website container. Something like 1200 or 1400 pixels is a good starting point.
3. Set the height to a very large number to give yourself plenty of scrolling room. Try 3000 or 4000 pixels. You can always adjust it later.
4. This next step is critical: Under Display Mode, select Fit to Width. This ensures the report fits perfectly horizontally while allowing a vertical scrollbar for the rest of your content.
5. Now, you can build your dashboard from top to bottom, knowing the user will have a seamless vertical scrolling experience.

Example 3: Format a Dashboard for a Wall-Mounted TV

Your team wants a live dashboard displaying high-level KPIs on a TV screen in the office. Most modern TVs use a 16:9 aspect ratio.

1. In the LAYOUT tab, click the Canvas Size dropdown and select Screen (16:9). Looker will default the canvas size to 1200 x 675 pixels. (If you want higher resolution for a 1080p screen, you could also choose Custom and enter 1920 by 1080 pixels).
2. For the Display Mode, choose Fit to Window. This will ensure your dashboard scales up to fill the entire TV screen, regardless of its specific resolution, without creating any awkward borders or scrollbars.
3. Keep your visualizations big and your text clear. Since people will be viewing this from a distance, use large fonts and high-contrast colors for maximum readability.

Report-Level vs. Page-Level Settings

It's important to remember that the settings in the Current Page Settings panel apply only to the page you have selected. Your Looker Studio report can have multiple pages, and each page can have completely different canvas dimensions and display modes.

This is incredibly powerful. You can have a "Dashboard" page formatted for a 16:9 screen and a "Details" page right next to it formatted as a printable A4 landscape report, all within the same file.

If you want to set a default canvas size for every new page you create in your report, you can do so in the global settings. From the top menu, navigate to Theme and Layout > Layout. Any changes you make here will be the default for the entire report, though you can still override them on a per-page basis.

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Final Thoughts

Adjusting the page size in Looker Studio is a simple yet powerful feature that transforms a generic report into a purpose-built tool. By matching the canvas size and display mode to your audience's viewing context - be it a printed page, an embedded frame, or a large screen - you create a more professional and user-friendly experience that helps your data make a bigger impact.

Of course, getting the page size right is just one part of the battle. The even bigger challenge for most marketing and sales teams is the time-consuming process of manually pulling data from different platforms and wrestling it into a dashboard in the first place. This is where we built Graphed to help. We connect directly to all your key data sources - from Google Analytics and Facebook Ads to Shopify and Salesforce - and let you create real-time, custom dashboards just by describing what you want to see in simple, natural language. It turns hours of report building into a 30-second conversation, freeing you up to focus on insights, not manual configuration.