Looker is an enterprise platform for data experiences. Let's review how to navigate the Looker platform and how you can use it to explore your organization's data. Looker is a browser-based Cloud application, which means you access it by opening an Internet browser like Chrome or Firefox, going to a URL and logging in. For example, the URL for a company's Looker instance might be company name.looker.com. Typically, you can login to an instance with an email and password combination. Though your company might have single sign-on enabled. In that case, you would click on an authenticate button to get in without the need to remember or store separate credentials. When you first login to the Looker platform, your homepage may vary depending on what your company's Looker administrator has configured. In this example instance, we are seeing the shared folders. Folders in Looker are where content lives just as files in your computer or Google Drive are stored in folders. Content in Looker terminology refers to Looks and dashboards. Looks are standalone reports or visualizations, while dashboards contain more than one visualization. We'll dive deeper into all of this as we explore this example Looker instance. Let's review the navigation options available to different types of users in Looker. First, the left side panel provides the content navigation options for users that have been added to the Looker instance as Data Viewers, which are users who need to find existing information quickly and easily. Data Viewers do not create their own reports and visualizations. Now if you have been added as a Data Explorer to a Looker instance, you will also see the Explore tab in the left side navigation panel of the Looker UI. As a Data Explorer, you use explores to ask questions of your data and create visualizations and reports that can be shared with others such as Data Viewers. For example, if you wanted to know something about orders, you choose something like an order items explore. Explores are curated by Looker developers in a proprietary templating language called BQML. The explores that you have been given access to will be listed under this Explore tab. The explore section of Looker is where we'll be spending the majority of our time in this walk-through. Next, the Develop menu is used by LookML developers to curate the explores that are accessible to Data Explorers via the Explore tab. Within the developer environment, developers can specify which fields are available in each explore, how each field appears, and the logic or behavior for each field. Developers can use the Toggle button at the bottom left side of the UI to enter development mode, to make and test changes, to LookML code before sending the changes to production. At your organization, you may not see a Develop menu, if that's not a part of your role. We will not review the options in the develop environment in this walk-through. As we will work with the explores that have already been created by LookML developers. Finally, Looker administrators use the Admin menu to configure the users, permissions, and other settings for the Looker instance, such as database connections. Again, in your organizations Looker instance, you may not see an Admin menu if that's not part of your role. We will not be using the options in the Admin menu in this walk-through, either. In this walk-through, we will focus on resources available through the browse and explore menus which provide the key options for Data Explorers to access, analyze, visualize, and share data. From the left side navigation panel of the Looker UI, you can access your recent Looker content browsing history in recently viewed. This might be useful if you need to access a report from a day or two ago, but can't remember what it's called or aren't sure where to look for it. When you do find something that you want to save for future reference, you can add it as a favorite and then access your list of favorites from here. This section will contain all of your bookmark dashboards and Looks. A useful feature that you can use is the Menu icon in the top left corner of the page to collapse or expand the left side navigation panel anytime. Moving on, boards serve as a useful way of organizing content, such as saving multiple Looks and dashboards onto one board that you can share with others. Finally, if your Looker administrator has installed any tools or blocks which are pre-built data models from the Looker marketplace, they would also show up in the left side navigation panel. Applications are not in the scope of this walk-through. Each user has a personal folder with their name on it. In the current view, it's labeled as my folder. For you as a Looker user, this is your own scratch space for works in progress, as well as a storage space for content that is only meaningful to you or your role. Finally, expanding the Folders menus allows you to see additional folders beyond the shared folders. For example, you can go to the People Folder under All Folders to see other user's personal folders. Now on the top right corner, you'll see four icons. First, the magnifying glass allows you to search across the Looker instance by keyword and also links you back to Looker connect for learning assistance. Second, the Looker marketplace is where you can find applications and tools to get more out of your data. Third, the help icon provides links to chat support, docs, a user guide, and more. Finally, the user icon is where you'll find access to information associated with your Looker account. Additionally, if you have admin access, a fifth gear icon will appear between the Looker marketplace and help icons that allow access to the admin settings page. Let's shift our focus to the shared folders page and explore folders and content. Folders contain looks and dashboards for specific groups of people. You can copy, move, or save looks and dashboards to a folder. Folders can also contains subfolders. The dashboard section shows various pieces of data in one location, like the business pulse dashboard for example. Each section of a dashboard is referred to as a single visualization or tile. Let's examine a dashboard. In our e-commerce company, we want to see how business is going at our company. So we click on the business pulse dashboard. Dashboards in business intelligence show you various pieces of information about some overall topic or domain, similar to how a dashboard on a car shows you various aspects of your car's performance, how quickly you're going, how much gas you have left in the tank, whether your headlights are on and so on. On business pulse, you can see some key metrics that a typical e-commerce company would care about, the number of users, average amount they spend per order, average amount each spends in their lifetime, number of orders so far this year, and how that compares to the same point in time last year. We call these single value visualizations. Scrolling down the dashboard, you can see some other visualization types Looker supports out of the box, including area and line charts, maps, tables, donor multiples, and column charts. Now, let's say you work in marketing and you want to see some more information about new users, may be because you want to send them a promotional code to thank them for registering on our e-commerce platform. In Looker, you can click on a visualization to drill down. Meaning, you can see a more detailed breakdown of the data. Clicking on the number for new users acquired, shows you details about these new users, their ID, first name, and last name. But what if you want to know more about them, like their ages and locations? If you have permission to access the underlying data, you will usually find an option to explore or explore from here to drill down into additional information. Clicking on this option takes you out of the dashboard and into a separate interface called the Explore. Yes, this is a different part of Looker. From this point on, you can work with the underlying data through the Explore without affecting the business pulls dashboard that you were just viewing. We've mentioned explore a few times, so, you may be wondering what exactly is an Explore? Well, an Explore is a report builder interface, as well as a portal to ask questions of your data. To the left of the screen is the field picker. Fields are bundled in these expand collapse menus called views. Each view is a related concept. Since you are in the order items Explore, you have a view for order information such as when an order was created, its ID, its status, and so on. However, orders do not exist in a vacuum, they're ordered by people or users. The goods come from inventories. The goods have product information such as brand and category, and they come from distribution centers. As you explore order data or assemble a report about orders, you may need to include fields from some or all of these other views. That is why they are all offered together in this order items Explore. Let's expand the user's view. Each view has dimensions at the top, which are attributes of the data, and measures at the bottom, which are aggregations of the data attributes. For now, let's continue our narrative as a marketer trying to send these new users a promotional code to thank them for registering on our e-commerce platform. Maybe your promotion is only applicable to users in the United States. You could filter on country and make it, is equal to USA. After adding, removing, or modifying fields in the Explore, you always need to click the Run button in the top right corner. Just like that, you have asked a question of the data. Who are the people who joined our website in the past 180 days and live in the USA and received your results? Now, from here, you could click on the gear icon to save this as a look for future reuse, save it to a dashboard if you plan together more related but separate information. Download it to your computer in a format such as CSV or a spreadsheet, or send it to a colleague for review and next steps. Back on the Browse page, you can also see a list of available looks. Unlike a dashboard, a look is a single report. For example, a look called the yearly revenue is a stand-alone report of yearly revenue from 2018-2021 displayed in a single visualization. Now, after this brief overview of the Looker user interface, we hope that you're excited to explore Looker some more, to analyze and visualize your data.
