Looker Documentation

What is a looker?

Looker is a big data analytics platform and business intelligence software that allows you to easily explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics.

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Why looker?

The Looker platform unleashes the importance of your data, allowing you to deliver impactful insights and create data experiences for every part of your organization. Business executives, data analysts, application developers, data scientists, customers, and business partners are all examples of people who work with data. Looker's capabilities can help anyone who needs data to do their job.

Looker documentation

Documentation is very essential for any software or tool to analyze it to fullest. The documentation reveals all the prospects, functionalities, operations and tasks, involved modules in that particular tool.In this looker documentation tutorial we are going to cover all the concepts in depth such as looker features, organizing the content, creating the dashboards, lookML, and explore on how to make it ready for the development, etc.

Next we will go through the complete looker documentation in a more detailed way.

Finding and organizing the content:

Looker gives you access to the data in your organization. Many users begin by perusing the reports which we call Looks and dashboards created by others in their organization. You will learn how to create content and organize it to meet your needs in this section.

Finding and viewing the content:

• Finding Content in Looker: Locate content created by others, such as Looks and dashboards.
• Viewing and Interacting with Dashboards: View and interact with dashboards.
• Viewing Looks : Browse and interact with previously saved reports (which we call Looks).

Organizing the content:

• Using Folders to Organize : Discover how to move, copy, and delete items within folders.
• Using Boards to Present Content : Create boards that display curated sets of Looks and dashboards for your various teams.
• Deleted and Unused Content for Administrators: Discover how you, as an administrator, can clean up deleted and unused content.

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Sending and sharing the content:

One of Looker's benefits is the variety of ways you can send and share content with colleagues and others outside your organization. You will learn how to send and share content in this section.

• Data Sharing: Learn how to share Looker data with others.
• Data Sharing via URLs: Share data via browser, short, or expanded URLs.
• Downloading Content: Download and format data or visualizations from Looks and Explores.
• Public Sharing, Importing, and Embedding of Looks : Provide public access to data via URLs, embedding, or spreadsheet placement.
• Delivering content with the Looker Scheduler: Deliver Explores, Looks, legacy user-defined dashboards, and LookML dashboards instantly or on a recurring basis to email, webhook, Amazon S3, SFTP, and some integrated services.
• Dashboard Scheduling and Distribution: Schedule and distribute dashboards via email, webhook, Amazon S3, SFTP, and some integrated services. Schedules can be edited, deleted, or duplicated.
• Scheduling Deliveries to the Slack Integration :Use Looker's Slack integration to schedule Looker data delivered directly to Slack.

Retrieving the data and turning into charts:

Many users want to take the next step after learning how to browse through other people's reports and dashboards and learn how to query data for themselves. This enables them to use their organization's data for their own purposes.

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Retrieving data:

• Exploring data in Looker : Discover how to use Looker to build queries, display results, and discover insights.
• Filtering and limiting data: Limit your results to the information you're looking for.
• Merging Explore results: Combine information from multiple queries.
• Looker filter expressions: Discover the patterns of Looker's filter expressions.
• Looker functions and operators : Examine the functions and operators that appear in Looker expressions.
• Adding custom formatting to numeric fields: In Looks and charts, apply Excel-style formatting to numeric data.

Related Article: Looker Data Visualization

Customizing the data:

• Using table calculations : Add new fields by calculating the results of your query.
• Adding custom fields: Create new field picker options by adding custom dimensions and measures.
• Creating Looker expressions: Use Looker expressions to perform custom calculations.
• Looker functions and operators: Learn about the functions and operators that are used in Looker expressions.

Charting the data:

• Creating visualizations and graphs: Based on the results of your queries, create visualizations and graphs.
• Types of visualization: Discover Looker's native visualization types.
• Color palettes: View the palettes for Looker's pre-installed color collections.
• Chart time formatting: Examine the time formatting options for Looker charts.

Creating reports and dashboards:

Many users want to learn how to create and edit their own reports which we call Looks and dashboards after learning how to query and chart data. This enables them to organize and present data in a logical and cohesive manner.

• Creating and editing the saved reports.
• Creating and editing the saved dashboards.
• Creating, enabling and filtering cross filtering dashboards.
• Creating and managing LookML dashboards, etc.

Related Article: Looker Analytics

Looker development environment:

• To unlock Looker's magic, data experts at each organization describe their data in LookML, a lightweight modeling language. LookML instructs Looker on how to query data, allowing everyone in the organization to create reports and dashboards without having to understand the underlying complexities.
• Explore different development basics such as understanding how a project works in looker, development mode, understanding model, working with files, etc.
• Explore how lookers generate SQl from LookML.
• Establishing the git and version control system.
• Setting up the database connection and using the looker marketplace in order to install, deploy, manage applications, and visualization types to a great extent.

Write LookML:

When a data modeler has mastered the fundamentals of creating projects and developing in Looker, it is time to write LookML! The flexibility of LookML allows developers to work with their organization's data and create custom experiences for Looker users.

As part of LookML you need to learn the basic and advanced concepts such as lookML, content validation, looker blocks, working with joins, reusing the code with extends, localizing your LookML model, etc.

Using the API and Embedding:

Looker can be obtained in ways other than through the application. You can also use Looker through the API or embed Looker content in websites, both publicly and privately, if you have the necessary permissions.

In the looker AP section you will explore the looker API, Looker APi authentication, Looker API troubleshooting, exploring on how to embed the looker content into web pages considerably.

• Security Best Practices for Embedded Analytics: When creating embedded content, keep these best practices in mind.
• Private Embedding: Learn how to make embedded Looks, Explores, or dashboards require a Looker login.
• SSO stands for Single Sign-On (SSO) Embedding: Create Looker embeds that use the sign-on functionality of your application for authentication.
• Viewing Embedded Looks, Explores, and Dashboards : Discover how to access, save, download, and schedule embedded content.
• Embedded JavaScript Events : Use JavaScript events to interact with Looker embeds.
• Timezone Reference for SSO Embedding: View a list of time zones for use in the user timezone parameter of SSO embeds.

Related Article: Looker Features

Setting up and administrator looker

Looker offers the possibility of having Looker host your instance or hosting it yourself. A Looker Sales Engineer or Professional Services consultant will assist you with the setup process.

There are also numerous settings that will assist you in administering your Looker instance. These options include options for customizing Looker for your organization, configuring authentication for users and groups, controlling user and group access to data and Looker features, and monitoring Looker usage and health.

• First need to explore the installation of the looker hosted instance and then customer hosted instances.
• Then set up the database connection and test the connectivity.
• You can explore the different administrative subjects that are needed by the lokker administrators.
• Next, we need to explore the various looker administration functions such as accessing the general pages, system pages, database, platform pages, authentication and server pages in depth to find out any issues.

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Looker features

• Looker really does have a lot of lovely features. The accompanying are a few of Looker's features. Let us go over them.
• Looker helps to reduce costs, effectively manage corporate deployments, and boost efficiency.
• New types of data experiences can be accessed and innovation processes can be sped up by using Looker's built-in Interactive elements.
• Looker increases revenue growth and improves the product's competitive advantage at a low cost.
• Filtering data from the dashboard can provide you with useful information. You can also initiate data in any possible conversation, with the option of using Slack to find a solution on the fly. It allows you to compare data from multiple sources from any location.
• Looker allows you to analyze and visualize data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and on-premise databases. It is a multi-cloud integrated platform from start to finish.
• With powerful data modeling that abstracts underlying data at any scale and creates a standard data model for the entire organization, business intelligence can be operated for anyone.
• Looker is a popular integration library that allows us to quickly integrate analytics from anywhere and personalize the look and feel of our data experience.
• Lookers augments business intelligence with artificial intelligence, cutting-edge machine learning, and advanced analytical capabilities built into the Google cloud platform.
• Looker allows you to create data-driven applications from supply chain data.
• It has a component that notifies the analyst of minor issues, ensuring that these minor issues do not lead to larger, more difficult-to-solve issues.
• Looker's graphs, reports, and charts are fully customizable and exportable.
• It relies on real-time data analytics to investigate and make sound business decisions.
• It establishes direct connections to any SQL database or other infrastructure. It is regarded as a self-learning database with some self-service capabilities.
• Looker features customizable dashboards as well as a browser-based interface. Lookers makes it simple to create dashboards. These dashboards are compatible with any device.

Related Article: Looker Data Actions

Conclusion

In the above blog post all points are explained with neat subheadings. Wants to get immense knowledge on the looker. Please go ahead with this looker documentation first that helps you to gain decent knowledge. Had any doubts drop your comments below, our experts will get back to you shortly.

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