Have you ever been learning a new tool and didn’t know where to start? There’s so much information available that sometimes it’s hard to know what to learn first. In this blog, you’ll find posts that go from the basics to more advanced concepts about Looker Studio, so let’s start with the first thing you’ll encounter when you open the tool: the home page.
After this, I’ll explain the report interface and also give an introduction on how to add data sources, although I’ll explain this in detail in a dedicated post.
1. The Looker Studio Home Page

The home page is very intuitive, but it’s worth reviewing its parts. It’s divided into five sections:
a. Recent Dashboards

The list you see in the center of the page shows the dashboards you’ve visited most recently.
b. Start a New Report

Above the dashboard list, you have the option to start a new document from either a blank report or a pre-designed template.
c. Left Menu

If you’re familiar with Google Drive, this is similar to the navigation there, though much simpler. You have a Create button from which you can start a new report, data source, or Explorer file. You can also filter reports that are owned by you or shared with you, or see files in the trash. Finally, there’s access to the template gallery created by Google for this tool.
d. Top Menu

In the top bar, there are three tabs: Reports, Data Sources, and Explorer.
- Reports: By default, when you enter the home page, this tab loads, showing the list of recent reports and the option to start a new one.
- Data Sources: Data sources created from the home are reusable and can be used in different reports. We’ll cover more about this in the dedicated post on data sources.
- Explorer: This is another tool that allows you to view data. In this tab, you can see the Explorer documents you’ve created or start a new one. The difference between Looker Studio and this tool is that the latter is used for quickly exploring your data (hence the name). It’s not intended to create reports to share, which is one of Looker Studio’s goals.
e. Search Box

This allows you to search through your reports and data sources. It’s especially useful when you have access to many of them and want to find them more quickly by searching.
2. Data Sources
As I’ve mentioned, we’ll cover data sources in depth in the dedicated post, but it’s important to mention them because, after all, data is the heart of our reports.
As we’ve seen, the top menu on the home page includes the option to create a blank report. If you choose this, the first thing Looker Studio will ask you to do is add your data sources. You have two options for doing this:
- Connecting them through a connector
- Adding them from “My Data Sources”
Connecting Data via a Connector

One of the advantages of this tool is that it can pull data from a multitude of sources. Connectors allow you to connect other tools to gather information from them. Two well-known examples are Google Sheets and Google Ads.
The problem is that the list of connectors is so large that it can feel a bit overwhelming.
The first ones you’ll find in this extensive list are Google’s native connectors. Among them, you’ll see the two mentioned above, but there’s also Google Analytics, BigQuery, CSV file uploads, YouTube Analytics, etc. At the time of writing, there are 24 available.
Scrolling down, you’ll see the non-Google connectors. Some well-known ones are from Supermetrics, which has connectors for extracting information from social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, and SEMrush connectors that pull SEO data.
If, after entering a connector, you don’t see the data you’re trying to connect, it could be because you don’t have permission to access it, or because you were just granted access and need to refresh the screen.
Adding Data from “My Data Sources”

Next to Connect to Data at the top, there’s My Data Sources. Here, you’ll find two types of sources:
- Reusable sources, meaning they’ve been added from the home page or marked as reusable (more on this in the dedicated data sources post).
- Sources added by someone else and shared with you as a Looker Studio source. This doesn’t mean that if someone shares a Google Sheets document with you, it will appear here. It has to be a data source added to Looker Studio and shared through the tool. It’s important that it was shared with you, because if not, it won’t show up here, even if it exists as a source for a report you can view.
- Sample data provided by Google for free. You’ll notice that all of these start with [Sample].
3. Reports and Their Main Parts
Once you’ve connected the data source, you can view your report. In this case, you’ll see it in Edit mode, but if you had opened an existing report, it would be in View mode.
If you have privileges to edit a report, you’ll see a blue button at the top that says Edit. Editing allows you to add visualisations, data sources, or filters, and change the theme and layout, among other things.

Menus
With Edit mode enabled, you’ll see two menus at the top of the screen (under the title). Both have more or less the same options, but one is text-based (File, Edit, View, Insert, Page, Arrange, Resource, and Help) and the other is more visual.

These are the menu options I use most frequently:
- Insert: From here, you can add components like charts, controls, text boxes, images, or geometric shapes like squares or lines. In the visual menu, you’ll find charts and controls under Add a chart and Add a control.
- Page: Where you can create, duplicate, or delete a page. The same as if you click Add page in the visual menu. Under Page, you can find the option to change the settings of the page you’re on. It’s super useful, and we’ll see why in the post dedicated to pages actions in Looker Studio.
- Resource: From here, the two actions I use most frequently are managing data sources and filters. There are other important actions we’ll cover in other posts.
In addition to these menus, each component has many editing and customisation options. To see what’s available for each, just click on the component, and a panel will appear on the right side of the canvas with the properties of the chart, where you can modify its settings and style. For example, if you’re working with a data table, its properties will allow you to change the font, dimensions and metrics, layout, etc. I explain this in detail in the individual posts dedicated to each Looker Studio chart.
Theme and Layout
Looker Studio allows you to customise the theme and layout of your reports. To edit them, select File in the top menu and choose Theme and Layout. This will open a panel to the right of the canvas with two columns:
Theme:

You can select a preset theme or customise it. The preset themes work like those available in more well-known tools like PowerPoint or Google Slides.
If you decide to customise it, go to Customise under Theme, and there you’ll see all the customisation options. You can change the background color, font, or palette colors, among other things.
Layout:

Within Layout, you can modify things like the visibility of the header, the position of the navigation pages (by default, they’re on the left), the canvas size, or the grid settings. The option I use the most here is the canvas size, so I can adapt it to the visualisations I want to display.
That’s the introduction to the Looker Studio interface and data sources. In other posts, you’ll see that I work with different datasets to develop examples. If you want to get access to these datasets, visit the page where I explain them in more detail. This way, you can connect them to your reports and start creating the visualisations and other components explained in this blog.
As always, I’d love to read your comments!