You can use Looker Studio (aka Data Studio) to visualize the data in your tables and workspaces in the Tables app!
Looker Studio is a reporting and dashboarding tool that lets you read data from multiple data sources, such as Sheets, Tables, BigQuery, etc. and create charts and tables and filterable dashboards to share with stakeholders. This is great for use cases like:
- Create a single dashboard to show charts/reports on separate tables in one view.
- Blend/combine data from multiple tables to be summarized in one chart/report.
- Report across data that's store in different products like Sheets, Tables, and BigQuery.
Visualize data with the Data Studio connector
How to connect Looker Studio to Tables
You can start off by A) creating a Report and adding the data source along the way, OR B) create a standalone Data Source first.
In Looker Studio, their "reports" and "data sources" are separate objects, and a report can pull data from multiple data sources, and multiple reports can reuse the same data source.
A) Create a Report with a Data Source
- Sign in to Looker Studio.
- In the top left, click , then select Report.
- A new "Untitled report" will be created, and a prompt to "Add data to report" will show up. Search for and select the Tables (by Area 120 by Google) connector.
- Continue to configure your data source (see below).
B) Create a standalone Data Source
- Sign in to Looker Studio.
- On the Looker Studio home page, in the top left, click Create and then select Data Source.
- Select the Tables (by Area 120 by Google) connector.
- Continue to configure your data source (see below).
Configure the data source
- If prompted to grant Looker Studio access to your account, click AUTHORIZE.
- You can select the table to connect to by either pasting a browser URL, or browsing recent workspaces and tables.
- Once you've pasted in the URL to the table, or selected the appropriate workspace and table --
- If adding a data source within a report: in the bottom right, click ADD.
- If adding a standalone data source: in the upper right, click CONNECT.
- The data source fields panel appears.
- The data source is now connected to your data set.
Warning: connecting to Looker Studio will allow you to report on and share the data beyond the original sharing permissions of the table. The data in Looker Studio will update depending on the user-configured data freshness setting (Looker Studio help center), or can be manually refreshed by the user.
Configure the data source
The data source fields panel is where you configure the data source by renaming fields and adding descriptions, adding calculated fields, and changing data types and aggregations. Learn more about working with data source fields.
Control who sees the data
At the top of the fields panel, you can change the data credentials. Credentials control who can see the data that this data source provides.
OWNER'S CREDENTIALS let other people view or create reports that use this data without requiring them to have their own access to the dataset.
VIEWER'S CREDENTIALS, on the other hand, require each user of the data source to provide their own credentials to access the dataset.
Learn more about data credentials.
Create a new report from the data source
- In the upper right, click CREATE REPORT.
- The report editor appears.
- Click ADD TO REPORT.
- This action adds the data source to the report.
- You can now create charts and controls that get their data from this data source.
New to Looker Studio?
Take the Create a report tutorial. Or learn more about the report editor.
What data is available from Tables?
You can access all data and columns from a table, with the exception of Smart Columns, which are not yet supported in our API or widely available. Below is how Tables column types are mapped to Looker Studio data types:
Looker Studio data type | Tables column types |
---|---|
Boolean | Checkbox columns (values are true, false, or null if no value was entered) |
Number | Number, Auto ID columns |
Date | Date, Update time, Create time, Comment time columns |
Text |
All other column types: text, dropdown, tags, location, checklist, file attachments, lookups, summary, row ID, etc. Notes:
|
Notes:
- When your table schema is changed (columns changed), you may need to refresh it manually (see below).
- Looker Studio has an inherent limit that will only display up to 1 million rows.
Updating Looker Studio after table column change
If any columns in the source table are changed (new columns added, columns deleted, or column types changed), you will need to manually refresh the data source definition, which can be done in the Looker Studio editor by the data source owner. See this Looker Studio help center article for more details.
Report an issue, get help, or request a feature
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