How to Create a Visual Report in Looker

Turning raw business data into a story anyone can understand is a superpower for any marketer, founder, or analyst. One of the best ways to tell that story is through a visual report, and Looker is a popular tool for doing just that. This guide will walk you through the process of creating your first visual report in Looker, from understanding the basic concepts to customizing and saving your final chart.

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First, What Is Looker and Why Use It?

Unlike tools that you connect directly to a single spreadsheet or app, Looker (now part of Google Cloud) is a business intelligence platform that typically sits on top of your company’s central database or data warehouse. Your data team uses a modeling language called LookML to define all your business metrics, dimensions, and the relationships between them.

This might sound technical, but the result is a user-friendly environment where anyone can explore data confidently. Because a data professional has already defined what a "user," "session," or "sale" means, you can trust that the metrics you’re pulling are consistent and accurate. This setup ensures everyone in the company, from marketing to finance, is speaking the same data language.

Understanding Looker's Core Concepts

Before you build anything, it's helpful to get familiar with the four building blocks you'll be using in Looker. Think of them as the ingredients for your data recipe.

Explores

An "Explore" is simply a starting point for a query. It's a curated dataset defined by your data team that’s designed to be explored. You might have Explores like "Users," "Orders," "Website Events," or "Tickets." Choosing the right Explore is your first step - if you want to build a report about sales, you'll start with the "Orders" or "Sales" Explore.

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Dimensions

Dimensions are the attributes or characteristics of your data. These are the fields you use to group, categorize, or filter your data. They are typically categorical or chronological. Think of them as the "who, what, when, where."

• User City: The city a user is from.
• Product Category: The category a product belongs to.
• Order Date: The date an order was placed.
• Traffic Source: Where a website visitor came from (e.g., Google, Facebook).

Measures

Measures are the quantitative values in your data. They are the numerical fields you can perform mathematical calculations on, like counting, summing, or averaging. Measures answer questions about "how much" or "how many."

• Count of Users: The total number of users.
• Sum of Order Value: The total revenue from all orders.
• Average Session Duration: The average time users spend on your website.

Filters

Filters allow you to narrow down your data to focus on specifics. You can apply filters to both dimensions and measures. For example, you might want to see data only from a specific date range or for a certain product category. This is essential for creating relevant and focused reports.

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Visual Report

Now that you understand the key terms, let's build a simple visual report. For this example, let's create a report that shows monthly revenue for the current year, broken down by product category.

Step 1: Choose Your Explore

Your first step is to pick the right starting block. Since our goal is to analyze revenue from orders, we’ll start from an Explore likely named "Orders" or "Sales."

1. Navigate to the "Explore" section in Looker's main menu.
2. Select the "Orders" Explore from the list. This will open the Explore interface.

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Step 2: Select Your Dimensions and Measures

On the left-hand sidebar, you'll see a list of available dimensions and measures. Dimensions are usually highlighted in blue, and measures are in orange.

1. Add the Time Dimension: We want to see revenue by month. Find a dimension group like "Order Date" or "Created Date." Click on it to expand the options. Select "Month." Looker is smart enough to pivot your data by this timeframe.
2. Add the Grouping Dimension: We also need to see the data by product category. Find a dimension like "Product Category" and click on it.
3. Add the Measure: Finally, we need our metric. Find a measure like "Total Sale Price" or "Order Revenue" and click on it.

As you click each field, it gets added to your query builder at the top. You'll see the fields you selected in the "Data" pane, but nothing will show up yet.

Step 3: Filter Your Data

Right now, our query would pull data from all time. We only want to see data for the current year. Let's add a filter.

1. Hover over the "Order Date" dimension field in the left sidebar. You'll see several icons, including one that looks like a funnel ("Filter"). Click it.
2. This adds a "Filters" section at the top of your workspace.
3. Set the filter logic. Choose "is in the year" and then enter the current year (e.g., "2024").

Step 4: Run Your Query

With all your fields and filters in place, it’s time to retrieve the data. Click the Run button in the top right corner. After a few moments, Looker will display the results in a data table below.

You should now have a table with three columns: Order Month, Product Category, and Total Sale Price. This is your report's raw data, but it's not very visual - yet.

Bringing Your Data to Life with Visualizations

Now for the fun part: turning that table into an informative chart. This makes the trends and patterns in your data instantly clear.

Choosing the Right Chart Type

Looker's "Visualization" pane lets you select from a wide range of chart types. Click the different icons to see how your data looks. Choosing the best type is key to telling a clear story.

• Line Chart When to use it: Excellent for showing trends over time. If your primary goal is to see how a metric progresses, a line chart is your best friend. For our example, this would show revenue trends for each category month-over-month.
• Column or Bar Chart When to use it: Perfect for comparing categories against each other. For our example, a stacked column chart would be a great choice. It would show total monthly revenue (the height of the column) with each section of the column representing a different product category. This makes it easy to compare both monthly totals and category contributions.
• Pie or Donut Chart When to use it: Ideal for showing the composition of a single total — parts of a whole. Be careful with these, they work best when you have six or fewer categories. If you filtered your report for a single month, a pie chart could show the percentage of revenue from each product category for that month.
• Table When to use it: Don't underestimate the power of a simple table. When you need to show precise values or have many different dimensions, a well-formatted table is often clearest. Looker offers great options for tables, including heatmaps to make high and low values stand out.

For our example, let's choose a Stacked Column Chart to see both the monthly trend and the category breakdown.

Customizing Your Visualization

Once you’ve selected your chart type, click the Edit gear icon in the top right of the visualization pane to fine-tune its appearance.

• Plot: Choose styles, such as how values are stacked.
• Series: Change colors for each series, customize labels, and adjust the chart type for a specific series. For example, you could overlay a line showing total revenue over your stacked columns.
• X-Axis/Y-Axis: Edit axis titles, format labels, and set a minimum or maximum range. For clarity, make sure your axes are titled properly (e.g., "Total Revenue ($)").

After a few tweaks, you’ll have a professional-looking chart that clearly communicates your data's story.

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Saving and Sharing Your Work

Once your visual report is perfect, you don't want to lose it. Looker gives you two main ways to save it:

Save as a Look

A "Look" is a saved report — a single query and its visualization. This is great for standalone reports that you want to reference later or send to a colleague.

1. Click the gear icon in the top right corner of the page (next to "Run").
2. Select "Save" → "As a Look..."
3. Give your Look a descriptive title (e.g., "Monthly Revenue by Category - YTD") and save it to a personal or shared folder.

Add to a Dashboard

A "Dashboard" is a collection of several Looks (or "tiles") on a single page. This is perfect for creating high-level overviews of business performance, pulling visualizations from many different reports into one place.

1. Follow the same steps to save, but choose "To an existing dashboard..." to add it to one you’ve already created or start a new one.
2. You can then resize and arrange your new visual report on the dashboard alongside other key metrics.

Congratulations! You've just gone from a broad question to a concrete, visual answer that can be revisited and shared anytime.

Final Thoughts

Learning to navigate a powerful tool like Looker transforms you from someone who consumes data to someone who can communicate with it. By mastering the core concepts and following these steps, you can create compelling visual reports that uncover insights and drive smarter business decisions.

While mastering tools like Looker is a valuable skill, it often comes with a significant learning curve of menus, terms, and processes like the one above. This is why we built our product, Graphed, to be entirely different. Instead of clicking through sidebars to find dimensions and measures, you can create a report using simple, natural language. We connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce so you can get live, interactive visualizations in seconds, just by describing what you need. It’s like having a data analyst on your team who can build your reports for you in an instant.