What is the Preset Filter in Looker Studio?

The preset filter in Looker Studio is a button that allows you to activate and deactivate filters to limit the data displayed in your charts. The dimension used in the preset filter must be boolean (true or false).

In the control’s set-up, you must decide if the filter should be true or false when the report is loaded. If it is true, the filter is applied to the charts on the page. If false, it has no effect, meaning the filter is not enabled. This doesn’t mean, like in a tickbox in Looker Studio, that the condition of the control doesn’t need to be met (if the tickbox filter is set to false, products from Wilson Jones will not be shown, as we saw in the tickbox control example).

For the examples in this post, I used the Products Superstore dataset. To learn more about how to add data sources in Looker Studio, visit the post on the topic.

1. When to use it?

Use the preset filter when there is a condition that is frequently used in a report.

2. Example

We can use the same control field as in the tickbox’s post, where we created a boolean field that returned true if the product name contained ‘Wilson Jones’ and false if it didn’t. Therefore, in your default filter’s configuration, you need to select Wilson Jones as Control field.

Visit the post on how to add controls to your report in Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.

It is important to use clear text for the button so that the end user understands it’s a filter. By default, the text will be ‘New Button’.

To change it, you need to click on the text, and you’ll see that the cursor appears, allowing you to modify it.

In the set-up of this control, you can also change the button’s action type in Looker Studio. Apart from using it as a filter, you can use it to navigate through your report’s pages or perform an action. To learn more about these other actions, check out this post on buttons.


As always, questions and comments are more than welcome 🙂

Leave a Comment