After learning how to browse through others’ reports and dashboards, many users go the next step and learn how to create their own reports, harnessing their organization’s data for their own specific needs. This page will show you how to get started exploring data.
Where to Start?
Please note that the menu items you see depend on the permissions that have been assigned to you. Business users often have the Browse, Explore, and Help menus. Technical users might also have the Develop and Admin menus.
The Basics
To get started exploring, follow these steps:
- Select Explore.
- Optionally, enter a keyword in the Explore search bar to find specific models or Explores. Looker will display any Explore that has the keyword in its name or in its description. Typically, each Explore is listed under its model’s name, which indicates the kind of data it uses.
- In the list of Explores, select the Explore you want to access. If your Looker developers have added descriptions for the Explores, hover over each Explore in the list to see its description.
- Click one or more grey fields (called dimensions) to group your data.
- Click one or more orange fields (called measures) to add information about those groups, such as totals and counts. In this example, we selected two measures.
- Click Filter, if desired, to add a filter to your report based on that field.
- Set the condition for any filters you’ve added. You can also click the Custom Filter checkbox in the upper right of the filters section for more flexible options.
- If desired, choose a visualization type, such as a column chart in this case. You can click on the gear menu in the upper right of the visualization section to customize your chart.
- Click Run.
These options are just the basics. The Explore section has additional features that you can learn about by following our suggested learning path.
Suggested Learning Path
If you haven’t reviewed our Getting Started Browsing Data tutorial, that’s a good place to start.
Next, learn how to use Looker to explore your data. You’ll learn how to build queries, configure visualizations, and save Looks:
- Exploring (Building Reports) - A sequence of pages that teach you how to use data to answer questions in Looker.
- Creating Charts and Visualizations - Information about how to turn your data into charts and other visualizations.
After you have created some visualizations, consider combining them into dashboards using this page:
- Building Dashboards - Information about how to build a dashboard in Looker.