How to Get Started On Looker
What is Looker
The Looker platform is Google’s business intelligence platform that provides access to live data in a web UI where users can easily build data visualizations and share new insights across their company.
Benefits of Looker
Looker opens the door to data and a more approachable data culture. It gives everyone the opportunity to understand how they are making an impact on their company’s goals and bottom line (with data).
Looker relieves some pressure from analytics teams, because instead of writing custom SQL for every new chart, you simply select the measures and fields you want to display in a new chart or interactive dashboard.
How it compares
Looker’s core value is data democratization. Unlike other platforms, it offers access to the actual data that you’re aggregating, aka what’s being stored behind your website. Any team member with permissions can explore, aggregate and visualize this data in their own way.
Who it is best for
Looker is a great option when you have business-ready data for others to use since it provides access to large-scale data in a way that anyone willing to spend a little time familiarizing with the UI can build analytics off of it.
Looker’s power and flexibility may not be for all companies. If your company prefers to leave business reporting to analysts, your team may look to PowerBI or Tableau, which provide more dashboard templates for data developers to work from.
My Favorite Features
One of mine is Looker’s automatic generation of a unique URL each time a visualization is built or changed. This makes it so easy to share and collaborate on insights, because it takes only a few seconds to make a change and send a new result.
Getting Started on Looker
When I introduce Looker to team members, here are the top three tips I mention:
1. It’s unbreakable: You can never “break” the data you see in Looker and it is difficult to break dashboards. The product is designed to enable and encourage exploration so click all the buttons, try viewing every variable and keep clicking that “Run” button to gain an understanding of the data!
2. Insights are easy to share: There are multiple ways your coworkers may be saving charts and dashboards in Looker - ask your data or analytics team where to get started. I like to use Looker’s pinboards which provide a nice space to organize dashboards and views related to a given topic like “Subscriptions”. Pinboards can easily be set as your homepage, or tagged on the left hand of your main page.
3. Explore row-level details: A great thing about Looker is you can pop open the row-level details behind any chart and see exactly what is being aggregated. The quick toggle to them helps you understand what is being recorded, and hey, if you catch duplicate data there, your data engineers will be very thankful.
What’s your experience with Looker been like? Any top tips that you would share?
