Downloading Data

This page discusses how to download the data (but not the visualization) from a Look or from the Explore page in a variety of formats. Downloading a dashboard as a PDF is discussed separately on this page.

To download data from a Look or an Explore page, click the gear dropdown in the upper left and select Download:

Data can be downloaded in the following formats:

• CSV
• Excel Spreadsheet (XLSX)
• HTML
• JSON
• MARKDOWN
• PNG (Image of visualization)
• TXT (tab-separated values)

In the Results section, choose whether you want visualization settings applied to your data download:

• If you choose With visualization options applied, Looker applies some of the visualization settings to your download, causing your download to appear similar to a table chart. Any of the following settings in the Plot and Series menus that are configured for the visualization will be applied to the data download:

  • Show Row Numbers
  • Hide Totals
  • Hide Row Totals
  • Limit Displayed Rows to a maximum of 500 rows shown or hidden.
  • Show Full Field Name
  • Custom labels for each column (note that JSON files will always use raw field names, not the field label)

• If you choose As displayed in the data table, visualization options will not be applied, and the download will appear like the data table in the Data section of the Look or Explore.

In the Values section, choose how you want the downloaded query results to appear:

• If you choose Unformatted, Looker does not apply any special formatting of your query results, such as rounding long numbers or adding special characters your Looker developers may have put in place. This is often preferred when data is being fed into another tool for processing.
• If you choose Formatted the data will appear more similar to the Explore experience in Looker, although some features (such as linking) aren’t supported by all file types.

You can choose how much data you want to download as follows:

• Results in table - Number of rows specified by the row limit of your Look.

• All Results - All results returned by the query.

  • The All Results option is disabled for users with download_with_limit permissions. In this case, use the Custom option (see below).

  • The All Results option is typically disabled for queries that have one of these characteristics:

    • involving row totals or table calculations
    • using percent of total, percent of previous, or running totals types of measures
    • getting data from a database dialect that can’t stream results
    • including pivoted columns that Looker calculates because the data comes from a database dialect that can’t calculate the pivots

    When you click Run in a Look or an explore, Looker determines whether the complexity of the query and the database dialect will allow the entire query to be downloaded. If so, the All Results option will be available in the Download window. Otherwise, the All Results option will be unavailable and you can instead use the Custom option and specify the maximum number of rows allowed with your permissions.

• Custom - A custom number of rows. Users with download_with_limit permissions are limited to 5,000 rows. The limit for other users is typically 100,000 unless the Looker admin has increased that limit.

Even when the All Results option is available, you should still use caution when downloading all results. Some queries are very large, containing thousands or millions of rows, which can overwhelm most spreadsheet programs. If you do not see the All Results option, talk to your Looker Administrator about permissions.

Click the Download button to download a file to your computer, or click Open in Browser to view the file in the browser.