Connecting your first data source

Every report starts with a data source. In this lesson we connect the sales pipeline Google Sheet and look at what Looker Studio does with it.

Prepare the sheet

Looker Studio reads a sheet best when it is a clean table:

• One header row, with clear, unique column names.
• One row per record, for example one row per deal.
• No merged cells, blank rows, subtotals or notes inside the table.
• Dates in a consistent format and numbers stored as numbers, not text.

Our pipeline sheet has columns for deal ID, company, owner, stage, amount, created date, close date and source. If your own sheets have extra summary rows, move them to a separate tab.

Create the report and connect

1. Go to lookerstudio.google.com and choose Blank report.
2. The Add data to report panel opens. Choose Google Sheets.
3. Pick your copied pipeline spreadsheet and the worksheet tab.
4. Leave Use first row as headers ticked and click Add.

Looker Studio creates a data source, adds it to the report and places a default table on the canvas.

Inspect the fields

Open Resource, Manage added data sources and edit the source. You see a list of fields, each with a type and a default aggregation:

• Text fields such as owner and stage are typed as text.
• Amount should be typed as Currency or Number. Set the currency so values display correctly.
• Created date and close date should be typed as Date. If a date field shows as text, change its type and check the format matches your sheet.

Aggregation sets how numeric fields combine by default, such as Sum or Average. For amount, Sum is right. For a field like deal ID, aggregation should be None or Count Distinct, since summing IDs makes no sense.

Data freshness

For Google Sheets, Looker Studio caches data for a period you can set in the data source, from every 15 minutes to every 12 hours. If you change the sheet and the report does not update, use Refresh data in the report menu to fetch the latest values.

Credentials

The data source has a credentials setting. Owner's credentials means viewers see data through your access, even if they cannot open the sheet. Viewer's credentials means each viewer must have their own access. We return to this in the sharing section, because choosing wrongly can expose data you did not intend to share.