2.3. Tables in Looker Studio

Why Use Tables?

While visualizations are great, sometimes a table is the perfect way to communicate data and tell a story. Tables can provide a more detailed view, complementing other visualizations such as time series charts.

Understanding Tables

In Looker Studio, tables display dimensions in rows and metrics in columns.

Dimensions describe properties of entities, while metrics are numerical values that count or measure entities.

Looker Studio Table Features

Tables can include grand totals, pagination, row numbers, and optional metrics. With Looker Studio's recent update, you can now have up to 100 metrics in a table and enable horizontal scrolling for easier viewing.

Highlighting Values

To make tables easier to read, Looker Studio offers several ways to highlight values:

1. Heat maps - Display the highest and lowest values with different shades of color. This helps quickly identify high and low values, but isn't ideal for comparing different values.
2. Bars - Show bars along with numbers in each column for easy comparison of values and identification of trends and patterns.
3. Targets - Set a target value for a metric, which can be configured under the style tab when a table is selected.

Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting can be applied to tables to highlight rows or values based on specific criteria. For example, you can change the background color for new visitors or highlight transactions above or below a certain value.

To access conditional formatting settings, select a table and go to the style tab at the top. You can define multiple conditional formatting rules and choose whether to change the background color, font color, entire row, or just the matching column.