How to Share Looker Studio Report Link

You’ve built a fantastic Looker Studio report, filled with valuable charts and insights. Now comes the important part: sharing it with your team, clients, or stakeholders. This guide will walk you through exactly how to share your Looker Studio report using different methods, explaining the nuances of each so you can share your work confidently and securely.

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Understanding Looker Studio Sharing Options

Before we jump into creating a shareable link, it's helpful to know all the ways you can distribute your reports. Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) offers a few different collaboration and sharing features, each suited for different situations.

• Invite people: This allows you to add specific people using their Google accounts, giving them either Viewer or Editor access. It's the most secure way to share with a specific, limited audience.
• Schedule email delivery: You can set up your report to be automatically sent as a PDF to a list of email addresses on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. This is perfect for recurring stakeholder updates.
• Get report link: This generates a direct URL to your live report. It's the most common and flexible method for sharing, as you can post the link in Slack, send it in an email, or save it for easy access.
• Embed report: This option provides you with an iframe code that allows you to embed your interactive report directly into a webpage, like a blog post or an internal company portal.
• Download report: You can download the report as a static PDF, which is useful for archiving or attaching to presentations.

In this guide, we'll focus primarily on the most flexible method: getting a report link. Understanding how to configure your link settings correctly is the foundation for effective and secure sharing.

How to Share a Looker Studio Report Link: A Step-by-Step Guide

Getting a link to your report is straightforward. The real power comes from understanding how to manage the access permissions that go with that link. Follow these steps to share your live, interactive dashboard.

Step 1: Open Your Looker Studio Report

First things first, navigate to lookerstudio.google.com and open the report you want to share.

Step 2: Locate the 'Share' Button

In the top right corner of the screen, you’ll see a blue “Share” button next to the “Edit” and “Present” buttons. Click on it. This will open the report sharing dialog box, which is where you’ll manage all access and permission settings.

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Step 3: Manage Link Sharing Access

The sharing dialog has two main sections: “Add people and groups” and “Link settings.” We are focused on the second part. The “Link settings” section shows you the current status of your link - by default, it’s usually set to “Restricted,” meaning only people explicitly added by email can open it.

Click the dropdown menu under “Link settings” to view your options.

Step 4: Configure Your Sharing Permissions

This is the most critical step. Choosing the right setting determines who can access your report and what they can do with it. Let's break down the main options:

Anyone on the internet with this link can view

This option makes your report publicly accessible to anyone who has the link. They can see the data and interact with any filters or controls you've included, but they cannot make any changes to the report's structure, charts, or data sources. This setting is ideal for sharing with clients, embedding a public-facing dashboard, or sending a report to a large group without needing to know their specific email addresses.

Anyone on the internet with this link can edit

Be very careful with this setting. As the name implies, it creates a public link that allows anyone who has it to become an editor. They can modify charts, change formatting, add or remove pages, and even alter data source connections. This is rarely the best option unless you have a very specific use case, like a public template you want others to copy and modify.

Restricted

This is the default and most secure setting. With this option, the report link will only work for Google accounts you have explicitly added in the “Add people and groups” section above. If someone without permission tries to open the link, they will be met with an “Access Denied” page. Use this for sensitive or internal-only reports.

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Step 5: Copy and Share the Link

Once you’ve selected the appropriate sharing permission, click the “Copy link” button. You now have a URL to your live report that you can paste into an email, a messaging app like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or any other communication channel. Anyone who follows the link will have the level of access you just configured.

Deep Dive into Access Levels: Viewer vs. Editor

Understanding the difference between a "Viewer" and an "Editor" is fundamental to secure collaboration. When you share a report, you are assigning one of these two roles.

• Viewer Access: A person with Viewer access can interact with the report's dynamic elements. They can use date range controls, apply filters, and hover over charts to see more data. However, they cannot change the fundamental design of the report. They cannot add new charts, modify existing ones, or change the color scheme. This is the perfect role for the end consumer of your report - the client, manager, or stakeholder who just needs to see the key performance indicators.
• Editor Access: An Editor has full control over the report. They can do everything a Viewer can do, plus they can add and remove charts, pages, and filters. They can also connect new data sources or modify existing connections. This role is meant for teammates or collaborators who are actively helping you build and maintain the dashboard.

When you use link sharing, the permission ("view" or "edit") is applied to everyone who uses that link. If you need to grant different permissions to different people, you should use the “Add people and groups” method to invite them directly with their specific role.

Practical Sharing Scenarios

Let's apply this knowledge to some common situations.

Scenario 1: Sharing a Monthly Marketing Report with a Client

Your client needs to see the performance of their campaigns, but they absolutely should not be able to edit anything. In this case, the best approach is to configure the "Link settings" to “Anyone on the internet with this link can view” and send them the link. This is simple, secure, and doesn't require you to manage their specific Google account.

Scenario 2: Working on a Sales Dashboard with a Teammate

You and your colleague are both responsible for building and updating the company's sales dashboard. You both need full editing privileges. The best method is to go to the “Add people and groups” section, type in your colleague’s Google account email, and set their role to “Editor.” This ensures only the two of you have editing rights, keeping the “Restricted” setting on the main link.

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Scenario 3: Displaying Company Metrics on an Internal Website

You want to display a live dashboard on your internal employee portal for transparent reporting. The easiest way is to use the “Embed report” feature. When you configure the embed settings, you are essentially creating a view-only version of the report in an iframe. This is often better than sharing a direct link, as it integrates seamlessly into the webpage, but it follows the same permissions principles.

Scenario 4: Handling a Highly Sensitive Financial Report

You have a report with confidential financial data that should only be seen by the executive team. The only secure way to share this is by keeping the Link settings on “Restricted” and manually adding each executive’s Google account email as a “Viewer” in the “Add people and groups” section.

Troubleshooting Common Sharing Issues

Even with careful planning, things can sometimes go wrong. Here are a couple of common issues and how to fix them.

• Issue: "My stakeholder gets an 'Access Denied' error screen." This almost always means your link setting is still on “Restricted.” Go back to Share > Link settings and change it to “Anyone on the internet with this link can view.”
• Issue: "I invited my coworker as an Editor, but they can't change the data source." Editing a report is different from editing a data source. Data sources have their own permissions. If the data source credentials are set to "Owner's Credentials," only the original creator can edit its connection. You may need to share access to the data source separately or change the data source credentials to "Viewer's Credentials."
• Issue: "My report link has stopped working entirely." This is very rare, but the owner of the Google account who created the report might have had their account disabled, or the report itself could have been deleted. Check to make sure the original file still exists in Looker Studio.

Final Thoughts

Mastering Looker Studio's sharing options allows you to seamlessly distribute insights to the right people with the right level of access. By understanding the differences between link-based sharing and direct invites, and between Viewer and Editor roles, you can collaborate effectively and ensure your valuable data stays secure.

While sharing a report is easy once it's built, the creation process itself is often the biggest bottleneck. Manually wrangling data and spending hours building dashboards is time that could be spent on analysis and strategy. At Graphed, we solve this by letting you create real-time marketing and sales dashboards simply by describing what you want to see in plain English. We connect all your platforms in one place and use AI to turn data chaos into clear, actionable reports in seconds, so you get to the collaboration and decision-making stage faster. Spend your time acting on data, not just building reports, with Graphed.