Person: Looker provides many ways for your to analyze, visualize and share your data. If you're looking to create a report that answers one specific question of your data, you should consider creating a Look which is a single stand-alone report in Looker. Looks are built from the results of a query in an Explore. Once created, a Look can be saved, favorited, shared or even scheduled for regular delivery. You can also drill down into the data presented in any Look by clicking on Explore From Here which will take you back to the underlying Explore, where you can modify the Look as desired. Creating a Look using your data is very easy, as long as you understand the components of an Explore and how they work. That's really the key here. If you understand how to work with dimensions, measures, filters, pivots, as well as table and offset calculations within Looker, you already understand how to assemble a Look. Let's walk through an example of assembling a Look in Looker together. First, you should always start with a question that you have of your data. To get the most value and clarity from your Looks, ensure you're asking a clear, straight-forward and, most importantly, measurable question. For example, you may want to know, "What were the yearly revenue values for each month in my data?" With this question in mind, let's assemble the components of this Look within the Explore. Next, to being assembling your Look, start with the Explore that contains the most appropriate data for analysis and visualization and select the dimensions and measures needed to answer your question. Then click Run. For example, selecting the month name dimension and total revenue measure in the Order Items Explore will show you the revenue for all order months in all years for which you have data, for example, January 2018, January 2019, et cetera. This doesn't yet answer your question, but this information gets you well on your way. For this example, if you want the revenue totals for each month within the time frame you specify, you need to pivot your data by the order created year. Pivoting this data will create a matrix in which each year will now be a column that can be easily represented in the visualization. When you apply the pivot, you can see revenue totals for each month of each year between 2018 and 2021. If you only wanted to see particular years or dates, you could apply a filter to Date to limit the results returned by the query. In this case, you want all years of data, so no filter is needed. The pivoted results answer your question, so you can now turn your attention to finding the best visualization for this view of your data. Looker provides a number of different visualization options, depending on the data you're analyzing and the question you're asking. For this Look, a single line chart can clearly highlight the changes in monthly revenue by year. You can further refine and customize this visualization to improve clarity for viewers. To see options for formatting and presenting data within the visualization, click on the edit dialog gear at the far right of the visualization bar, also referred to as the Visualization Settings. Depending on the type of visualization, you will see different options for positioning, coloring, labeling and more. So now that the Explore is configured like you want, you can click on the gear menu in the top right of the screen, next to the Run button, and see the many options available for saving and sharing these results. For example, you can save your Explore results and visualization to a dashboard, download or send it, save and schedule it for delivery or share a URL to Explore results. To save your visualization and Explore results as a Look, select Save as a Look. Finally, in the Save Look dialog box, you will be asked to provide a name for your Look, as well as an optional description field. You can also decide where to save this Look, either just for yourself in your personal folder or within the Shared folder for easy access and discoverability by others in your organization. Once you've configured those items, click on Save to save your Look, or Save and View Look to save and see your finalized Look. And with that, you've now created a new Look.
