How did this happen?
In the past 6 years, I’ve been using Tableau almost exclusively at work. I had a small dive into Power BI and tried out Metabase – which I found a decent solution given its price. But now it’s time to enter my Looker era (have to admit that even though I know this is a thing now, I don’t know any Taylor Swift songs – sorry)!
I started searching for jobs during the spring when we decided I’d leave Budapest for Berlin. As I spent more time on LinkedIn, I noticed that most roles required Looker knowledge. This was a bit of a shocker for me since I thought I could find something comfortable where I would have my Tableau knowledge as a safety net. It would’ve been good to check this point off from the list of worries. Learning a new language, crying over German letters sent by the administration, and moving to a foreign country was enough to drive my anxiety levels over the peak, but it soon turned out that I had low chances of leaning back on my Tableau knowledge.
In July, I bought a course on Udemy to familiarise myself with this new tool and went through it within a few days. To my surprise, I didn’t hate it! Yes, it’s not as fancy as Tableau, and less flexible than any other tools I tried so far, but Looker has its advantages as well. And let’s face it: when did I use any of those shiny features in a business environment? Almost less than never. Not because I didn’t want to, but because there was no time for it in a fast-paced environment, and I don’t want anyone to maintain the Sankey charts I hacked together 2 years from now.
When I was offered my new job, I started digging into Looker dashboard designs, and slowly built up the courage that I would be able to make nice things here. I bookmarked a couple of great dashboards and waited for my start date in a state of utter calmness. BUSTED! On my 3rd working day, it turned out that Looker and Looker Studio are completely different platforms, and everything that gave me that little boost of confidence is only possible in Looker Studio. Nevertheless, I still have high hopes that I can make it work. After a 10-hour course and 3 weeks into Looker by no means do I call myself an expert, but I collected a couple of things I like, and don’t like so far.
On the like side
- I’m absolutely in love with the filters, there are so many options here to choose from: radio buttons, button groups, and toggle buttons!
- Snapping containers offer a way better and easier UI than containers, while it also takes less time to setup
- Intuitive drill-down function without the need to build out ‘Detail’ tables
- Advanced functions (built-in probability calculations, lists, pivots) are available, and the documentation is very comprehensive
- The possibility of markdown is almost a fair compensation for not being able to use any other design elements
On the don’t like side
- There’s no possibility to use floating elements (and yes, if you ever wondered, I’m team floating!)
- There are close to zero resources other than the Looker documentation on things I’ve researched so far
- Looker tricks you into thinking that you can use maps as a chart, but before you get fooled, only if you define a certain map layer in LookML
- Since we’re speaking of it: LookML – however, I keep the possibility open that this can change over time
Will I write Looker tutorials?
I find this very unlikely, even though I already found a solution to hack the system and create a single donut chart. Believe it or not, it’s possible to use donut charts in Looker when it comes to small multiples, but for a single value, only a pie chart is available. Unreal.
Since I’ve started my new job I was tasked with designing a new landing page, and even though there are a lot of constraints, I have high hopes that the end result will manifest itself as a decent solution. What I absolutely like about Looker is the markdown option. This will let me incorporate design elements (a banner, images that will link to a given board, etc.) into the dashboard, plus showcase our company KPIs and a visual data catalog.
Judit Bekker 