Looker Studio
Free, Google-native dashboards that turn a spreadsheet or Analytics account into a shareable report in minutes.
What it is
About Looker Studio
Looker Studio lets users connect to data sources (Google Sheets, BigQuery, Google Analytics and hundreds of third-party connectors) and build interactive, shareable dashboards and reports without writing code. It's the free, lighter-weight sibling of Google's enterprise 'Looker' BI platform, and widely used by marketing and small-business teams for reporting because it's free and integrates natively with the rest of Google's ecosystem. Reports update live as underlying data changes and can be shared like a Google Doc.
What you can do with it
Capabilities
Connect to Sheets, BigQuery, Google Analytics and 500+ data sources
Build interactive dashboards with filters, date ranges and drill-downs
Share live reports with stakeholders via link, embed or scheduled email and PDF
Blend multiple data sources into a single report
Apply calculated fields and basic data transformations without SQL
How to learn it
Learning Resources
Google's official Looker Studio help centre and template gallery
Google Skillshop's free Looker Studio training modules
YouTube channels like Analytics Mania and Loves Data
Practise by connecting a free Google Analytics or Sheets dataset and building a report from scratch
Pro Tip
Use a Google Sheet as a 'data source layer' between raw exports and your report — it makes it far easier to clean, reshape or blend data than fighting Looker Studio's blending limits directly.
Skills that use this tool
Roles that use this tool