How to Export Charts and Tables from Looker
Need to pull a chart or table out of a Looker dashboard to use in a presentation or a different report? It’s a common task, but Looker’s variety of options can be a bit confusing at first. This tutorial will walk you through exactly how to export your data, covering everything from single charts to entire dashboards, and explaining what each file format and setting means.
Why Would You Export from Looker?
While Looker is a powerful tool for exploring live data, there are many practical reasons to export charts and tables. You're most likely trying to:
- Share with others: The most common reason is sharing insights with stakeholders, clients, or colleagues who don't have a Looker account. An exported image or PDF is perfect for that.
- Build a presentation: You can drop an exported PNG chart directly into a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation to illustrate a key point.
- Perform offline analysis: Sometimes you need to dig deeper or combine the data with another dataset. Exporting as a CSV or Excel file lets you work with the raw numbers in your favorite spreadsheet tool.
- Create formal reports: Exporting an entire dashboard as a PDF can create a clean, professional-looking report for monthly or quarterly reviews.
- Archive data: You might need to save a snapshot of your data at a particular point in time for compliance or record-keeping.
Whatever your reason, the process is fairly straightforward once you understand where to click.
How to Export a Single Chart or Table from a Dashboard
Let's start with the most frequent task: grabbing a single visualization (in Looker, this is called a "tile") from a dashboard. This could be a bar chart, a line graph, a single number value, or a data table.
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Step-by-Step Instructions:
- Navigate to the Looker dashboard containing the chart or table you want to export.
- Hover your mouse over the tile you want to download. A three-dot menu icon will appear in the top-right corner of that tile.
- Click the three-dot menu. This will open a dropdown list of options.
- Select the "Download data" option. A new window or modal will pop up.
- In this new window, you will choose your preferred file format and adjust any settings (we'll break these down in the next section).
- Once you've made your selections, click the "Download" button. Your file will be saved to your computer.
That's the basic process. The real choices happen when you have to decide on the file format and other settings within the download modal.
Understanding the Export Formats and Options
The "Download data" modal offers several formats. Choosing the right one depends entirely on what you plan to do with the data. Let's look at the most common options and their best use cases.
File Formats
- Excel Sheet (XLSX): This is your go-to format if you plan to do further analysis in Microsoft Excel. It preserves the table structure and number formatting, making it easy to create pivot tables, add formulas, or build new charts directly in Excel.
- CSV: A "Comma Separated Values" file is a plain-text format that's universally compatible. Choose CSV if you need to import the data into another tool (like a database, Google Sheets, or a different BI tool) or if the stakeholder you're sending it to doesn't use Excel.
- PNG (Image): This exports your chart exactly as it appears on the dashboard, including colors, labels, and styles. A PNG file is an image with a transparent background, which makes it perfect for placing seamlessly onto presentation slides or into documents without a clunky white box around it. This is purely for visual sharing - you cannot edit the data within a PNG.
- PDF: This will export the data tile into a Portable Document Format file. It's best used when you want a fixed, uneditable version to send to someone or to archive. For tables, it creates a readable document. For charts, it behaves much like an image.
- JSON: The JSON format is structured for programmatic use. You'd only choose this if A) you're a developer or data analyst, and B) you plan to use this data output in an application or script. For general business users, it’s safe to ignore this one.
- TXT (Tab-Separated Values): Similar to a CSV, but uses tabs instead of commas to separate the values. It’s less common but serves essentially the same purpose as a CSV for importing raw data into other applications.
Key Formatting Options
Beneath the file format selection, you’ll see several important settings that control how your data is exported. The options can vary based on your Looker instance and user permissions, but here are the main ones to know.
- Results: This setting determines how much data you get.
- Values: This controls the formatting of the numbers.
- "Use visualization options applied": This is a checkbox that appears for some formats like CSV and Excel. If you check it, Looker will try to arrange the data output to be similar to how it appeared in the visualization (for example, keeping pivot table structures). If you uncheck it, you get a simple, unpivoted raw data dump, which can be easier to work with.
How to Export an Entire Dashboard
Sometimes you need to share a snapshot of the whole dashboard, not just one tile. The process is similar, but you'll start from the dashboard's main menu instead of a specific tile's menu.
Steps:
- With your dashboard open, click the main three-dot dashboard menu in the top-right corner of the screen (next to the "Filters" button).
- Select "Download".
- You'll get a modal with fewer format options, usually PDF and CSV.
- PDF: Choosing PDF gives you formatting controls to make a professional report. In the "Advanced Options" section, you can choose layouts like "tiled" (which attempts to preserve the dashboard layout) or "Fit page to dashboard" (single-column). You can also set paper size (e.g., Letter, A4) and orientation (portrait or landscape).
- CSV: Choosing this option doesn't give you one big file. Instead, it generates a "zipped" folder containing a separate CSV file for every tile on your dashboard. This is very useful when you need the source data for all the visualizations at once.
After choosing your format and settings, click "Download" to generate and save the file.
A More Efficient Way: Scheduling Exports (Deliveries)
Do you find yourself exporting the same report every Monday morning? You can automate this process by scheduling a delivery directly from Looker.
Steps:
- Click the main dashboard three-dot menu and select "Schedule delivery".
- Destination: Choose where you want the report sent. Common options include Email, a webhook, an Amazon S3 bucket, or a Google Drive folder.
- Format: You can select the file format just as you would with a manual download (PDF, CSV zip, etc.).
- Settings & Filters: You can apply specific dashboard filters to your scheduled delivery. For example, you can create one schedule to email European performance metrics to the EU team and a second schedule to email US metrics to the US team, all from the same dashboard.
- Recurrence: Set the cadence - daily, weekly, monthly - and the specific time you want the report to run and send.
Once saved, Looker will automatically generate and send the export at your specified time, saving you from a tedious, repetitive manual task.
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Final Thoughts
Exporting charts and data from Looker is a flexible process once you're familiar with the different download options for single tiles versus entire dashboards and the use cases for each file format. Mastering these steps ensures you can easily share valuable insights with anyone in your organization, in the format that works best for them.
While exporting data for presentations or emails is often necessary, if you find yourself frequently returning to the system to pull data and answer recurring questions, your team might need easier access to real-time data. That's exactly why we developed Graphed. Our goal is to eliminate the challenges of preparing reports in Excel or learning complex BI tools. With Graphed, you can easily connect all your data sources and create real-time dashboards and reports in seconds, just by writing in natural language. This way, you can break free from the cycle of manually downloading, editing, and sharing reports, and instead focus on the valuable insights that will help grow your business.
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