This page discusses how to download the data or a visualization from a Look or from the Explore page in a variety of formats. Downloading dashboards is discussed separately on the Viewing Dashboards in Looker page.

To download merged results queries, you can save the query to a dashboard and then download the dashboard as a PDF or as a collection of CSV files.

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

File Formats

Data can be downloaded in the following formats:

• PDF (for dashboards)
• CSV
• Excel Spreadsheet (XLSX)
• HTML
• JSON
• MARKDOWN
• PNG (Image of Visualization)
• TXT (tab-separated values)

While choosing your data format for downloading, if you don’t see the HTML or PNG (Image of Visualization) options (for Looks) or the PDF formats (for dashboards), check with your Looker admin about enabling the Enhanced Rendering Labs feature and installing Chromium or PhantomJS for your Looker instance.

Results

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.

Values

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.

Limit

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. Before selecting this option, see the All Results section below.
• 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 your Looker admin has increased that limit (see this Community topic).

All Results

When you click Run in a Look or an Explore, Looker checks your permissions and determines whether the complexity of the query and the database dialect will allow the entire query to be downloaded:

• The All Results option is disabled for users with download_with_limit permissions. In this case, use the Custom option instead of All Results.
• The All Results option is typically disabled (see more in this Community topic) 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

If you have the permissions and if Looker determines that your entire query can be downloaded, 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 to specify the maximum number of rows allowed with your permissions.

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 admin about permissions.

Remove All Sorts from Query

When you select All Results, you may also see the option to Remove all sorts from query. This option prevents sorting on your query before downloading the results. Selecting this option may speed up your download, since sorting a query can be costly to performance for certain database types.

The Remove all sorts from query option is not supported for pivoted results.

Download or Open in Browser

Once you’ve selected your options, you can click the Download button to download a file to your computer, or click Open in Browser to view the file in the browser.

For Admins: Enabling Downloading Data for Your Looker Instance

For downloads of large Excel files, see this documentation page if you encounter any problems.

See important information about CSV files on this documentation page.

Certain downloading options require that Looker admins have enabled the Enhanced Rendering Labs feature and that on-premises Looker admins have installed PhantomJS or Chromium for their Looker instance. Read more about rendering image-based data formats when downloading Looks or dashboards on this documentation page.