Create your first Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) Dashboard

6 min readDec 25, 2022

Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is an online tool for converting data into customizable informative reports and dashboards introduced by Google in 2016 (source: Wikipedia).

It is a free BI tool to create an interactive dashboard online. The advantage of Looker Studio is that it is easy to use and it requires only Gmail to get started. Although Looker Studio has some limitations on complex calculations or visualization, it is enough to quickly create a useful dashboard.

In this article, I will show you step-by-step how to create a dashboard with Looker Studio. You can follow this tutorial and put the created dashboard in your portfolio. Awesome!!

If you are familiar with other BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau, you will understand the concept easily. Anyway, don’t worry if you never try that tool before, this is much less complicated.

Enough talk, Let’s start!

Steps summary

Create a data source
Create charts
Create drop-down lists
Make the dashboard beautiful
Share the dashboard

Create a data source

The data source that I will use in this tutorial is a dataset of used car prices and can be downloaded from https://www.kaggle.com/code/vijayaadithyanvg/car-price-prediction-used-cars/data

Go to https://datastudio.google.com/

Then click Create -> Data Source

Search for csv (Comma-separated values) and click File Upload

You will see an uploading file area. Click on “CLICK TO UPLOAD FILES” and find the downloaded file in the directory or drag the file to this area.

Wait until the file status becomes uploaded. Then, click the CONNECT button.

You will see the detail of the table like column names and types. Change the data type of each column to the appropriate one. The data type will affect the chart you create in a report. On this page, you can create a new calculated parameter by clicking ADD A FIELD.

Next, click on CREATE REPORT.

Create charts

After clicking on CREATE REPORT, you will go to the report/dashboard page.

Delete the table (or any chart) by clicking on the table/chart and pressing the delete button.

The concept of the Looker Studio is dragging fields on the Data Area on the right to the dashboard area and the chart will be automatically created. Then, you can adjust the chart in the Chart area which contains 2 tabs: SETUP and STYLE.

Let’s start with a combo chart.

I want to show average car price trends each year in both the present price and the selling price along with the number of records in the dataset to check the reliability of data.

Drag “Year” from the Data Area to the Dashboard Area. Follow by dragging “Present_Price” and “Selling_Price” to the chart created after dragging “Year”. The “Record Count” may be added automatically. If the “Record Count” is not in the Metric, drag it from the Data Area to the chart. Dimension and Metric in the Chart Area should look like this.

However, we want the average prices each year not the summation of the prices. Click on the SUM and change to Average.

Currently, it is a line chart, not a combo chart. This chart doesn’t distinguish the price and the record count, so it may misguide users.

To change a chart type, click on the chart on the dashboard, click on the Chart in the Chart Area, and select the chart type. In this case, select the Combo chart.

You will see a combo chart like in the below picture.

Next, create a column chart

I want to compare the present price and the selling price grouped by categories such as car name, fuel type, transmission, and the number of owners.

To create a column chart for car name, drag the “Car_Name” from the Data Area to the Dashboard Area. Then, drag “Present_Price” and “Selling_Price” to the chart.

Change the chart type to a column chart.

You will see a column chart as illustrated below.

Do the same for fuel type, transmission, and the number of owners.

Create drop-down lists

Drop-down lists are designed for user input. They will filter charts based on drop-down values.

To add a drop-down list to the dashboard, Click on the Insert tab and select the Drop-down list. Then, drag the field you want to create a drop-down to the Control field.