The date range control in Looker Studio allows you to select a specific time period for all charts on the page simultaneously.
Visit the post on how to add controls to your report in Looker Studio, if you want to learn more.
For the date range control to take effect on your page’s charts, the chart itself must have the Auto option selected within Default date range in its set-up.

This control has many period options that can be selected (today, yesterday, this week, etc.). There is even the possibility to choose whether we want the week to start on Sunday or Monday. It also has advanced options where both the start and end dates can be dynamic.
The following image shows a date range control with the week of October 7th to October 13th, 2024, selected.

1. When to use It?
When you want the end user of the report to be able to filter data for different time frames.
2. Example
Just like in the other posts about controls in Looker Studio, in this example, I will continue using the Products Superstore dataset. To learn more about how to add data sources in Looker Studio, visit the post on the topic.
If on the page of your report with Products Superstore data you want to see only those transactions where the purchase date falls in September 2013, you must add the date range control and choose September 1, 2013, as the start date and September 30 of the same year as the end date.

You can click on the month name along with the year to switch from one year to another instead of month by month.

But wait, did you notice that something is missing? You don’t have the option to select a dimension in the configuration of the date range control. So how do we know it’s filtering by purchase date and not by shipping date? Both date fields are available in our data.
There’s an easy solution! If you select one of the charts on the page, such as the table we’ve been using in the examples, you’ll see that in the set-up there’s a field called Date range dimension. Most charts have this field available, and it’s this field that your date range control uses. This means that you can use different date range dimensions in two different visualisations since the field is selected at the chart level and not in the date range control.

Remember that if you have Custom selected as the Default date range in your chart’s set-up, the date range control will have no effect on it. For the date range control to manage the dates displayed by the chart, it must have Auto as the Default date range.
Do you usually use the date range control? Would you say it is one of the most commonly used controls?