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Looker Studio

Looker Studio is an online dashboarding tool from Google.

Looker Studio is the primary tool used within GDS for data visualisations and reporting.

Report creation

If you are a member of GDS staff, please use one of the standard data connections listed here when creating a new report. If your data source is not listed there, it may not have a standard data connection. If that is the case, please follow the instructions on data connections below, or ask the Data Engineering channel for support.

Make sure to add the Looker Studio GA4 property ID to your report to track usage.

Data sources and connections

Creating new data connections

When creating a new data connection to be shared, you should:

  • Turn off Community Visualisations
  • Set the ‘Data credentials’ used to the viewer’s
  • Add the Google Group ‘data-connection-editors@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk’ as editor
  • Share with the GDS domain as viewer so that others can use your connection

Community visualisations must be turned off because a DPIA has not been carried out on them to assess the potential risk of data loss.

If you are connecting to a BigQuery dataset, it is better to connect using a custom SQL query with date range parameters than to connect to the table directly. This is because some of our data is stored in sharded tables, and Looker Studio queries all shards when direct connections are established. This can be quite costly given the size of our datasets.

For some data, however, we have now created partitioned tables which are more efficient to use than sharded tables. For example, we have a partitioned flattened table for GOV.UK GA4 data. These can also be used in custom SQL queries to connect Looker Studio to BigQuery.

For SQL examples showing how to connect to both partitioned and sharded data sources with date parameters, please refer to our guidance onLooker Studio best practice

When setting up the connection, ensure you select the appropriate billing project. For most shared reports that will be the GDS BQ reporting project.

Sharing reports

Do not make your reports ‘unlisted’ or ‘public’ to share them. You can either share your reports with anyone on the GDS email domain, or with specified individuals or Google groups.

This page was last reviewed on 10 October 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 10 April 2025 .
This page was set to be reviewed before 10 April 2025. This might mean the content is out of date.