Associate Data Practitioner

Develop and Customize Interactive Dashboards in Looker

Interactive dashboards in Looker let analysts and business users quickly explore and visualize data to answer questions. A dashboard is a collection of tiles (charts, tables, text, and more) arranged on a single page. You can add saved Looks or ad-hoc queries as tiles, then adjust how each tile displays its data. Looker dashboards automatically refresh when underlying data updates, ensuring you always see the latest information. This real-time insight helps teams make faster decisions.

To create a new dashboard, go to the Looker UI’s Dashboards page and click New Dashboard. Then, use the Add Tile option to choose from:

• Visualizations: line charts, bar charts, gauges, and tables
• Looks: re-use previously saved analyses
• Text: add titles, descriptions, or grouping headers
  After choosing a tile type, configure its data source, chart style, and display settings in the tile editor. Customizing each tile lets you highlight the most important metrics.

Organizing content helps users focus on key insights. You can:

• Drag and drop tiles to rearrange the layout
• Adjust tile sizes for emphasis
• Insert text tiles to create sections or collapsible panels
  These grouping techniques keep related charts together and make the dashboard more readable. A clean layout guides viewers to the most critical parts first.

Applying filters and dashboard parameters makes dashboards dynamic and user-friendly. You can add:

• Dashboard-wide filters that impact all tiles (for example, filtering by region or date)
• Tile-level filters for focusing on a single chart
• Parameters that let users type in values to update queries on the fly
  These interactive elements let viewers tailor the dashboard to their own questions without editing the dashboard itself. This flexibility empowers users to explore data on demand.

Sharing and collaboration in Looker are straightforward. You can share dashboards with users or user groups by setting Viewer or Editor roles. You can also copy or fork an existing dashboard to experiment safely. Looker’s version history lets you view changes, compare revisions, or revert to earlier versions. For teams using LookML-based dashboards, managing dashboards as code in source control ensures consistent updates and clear review processes.

Conclusion

In this section, you learned how to build and personalize dashboards in Looker by adding and configuring tiles, arranging layouts, and grouping related charts. You explored ways to make dashboards interactive using filters and parameters so users can dive deeper into the data without changing the underlying setup. Finally, you saw how to share and collaborate on dashboards through role-based access, version history, and code-based management. Mastering these skills ensures you can respond to business questions quickly and clearly by delivering up-to-date, interactive data views.