Looker cookbook: Getting the most out of Looker visualizations
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Simple and concise visualizations are a powerful way to display data trends and help users make meaningful data-driven actions to maximize impact. For example, dashboards are a great tool for telling stories about data — but users don't always have the time to process and distill information that is presented across many dashboard tiles.
This cookbook contains a series of use cases (referred to in the Looker cookbooks as "recipes") for customizing and condensing data points in Looker visualizations. The following table lists these recipes, which let users more quickly and efficiently consume impactful information.
Additional helpful visualization references are linked in theVisualization resourcessection on this page.
Contextualize data in Cartesian charts by using colors and custom formatting.
Users who can create and save content
LookML developers
Visualization resources
The following documentation pages offer detailed information about the visualization types offered in Looker, along with steps for creating an Explore and saving content:
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-07-22 UTC."],[],[],null,["# Looker cookbook: Getting the most out of Looker visualizations\n\nSimple and concise visualizations are a powerful way to display data trends and help users make meaningful data-driven actions to maximize impact. For example, dashboards are a great tool for telling stories about data --- but users don't always have the time to process and distill information that is presented across many dashboard tiles.\n\nThis cookbook contains a series of use cases (referred to in the Looker cookbooks as \"recipes\") for customizing and condensing data points in Looker visualizations. The following table lists these recipes, which let users more quickly and efficiently consume impactful information.\n\nAdditional helpful visualization references are linked in the [Visualization resources](#visualization_resources) section on this page.\n\nRecipes and applications\n------------------------\n\nVisualization resources\n-----------------------\n\nThe following documentation pages offer detailed information about the visualization types offered in Looker, along with steps for creating an Explore and saving content:\n\n- [Selecting an effective data visualization](/looker/docs/visualization-guide)\n- [Creating visualizations and graphs](/looker/docs/creating-visualizations)\n- [Viewing and interacting with Explores in Looker](/looker/docs/viewing-and-interacting-with-explores)\n- [Creating and editing Explores in Looker](/docs/creating-and-editing-explores)\n- [Using table calculations](/looker/docs/table-calculations)\n- [Adding custom fields](/looker/docs/custom-fields)\n- [Saving and editing Looks](/looker/docs/saving-and-editing-looks)\n- [Creating user defined dashboards](/looker/docs/creating-user-defined-dashboards)\n- [Security best practices for embedded analytics](/looker/docs/security-best-practices-embedded-analytics)"]]
