Histograms in Looker

law1
Participant II

Is it possible to add histograms as the next visualization added? What do other people do in order to generate histograms in Looker nowadays?

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Hey patient Lookers,

Histograms are here! We now have a custom viz (built by Looker) available in the marketplace to install: 

Just go to: https://<yourinstancename>.looker.com/marketplace/view/viz-histogram

You can see the README here: https://github.com/llooker/viz-histogram-marketplace/blob/master/README.md

Let us know what you think, or hey— make a pull request if you have any tweaks. It’s open source :grinning: .

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28 REPLIES 28

Fab2
Participant II

I’m not sure what kin of data you are looking to represent, but do you mean bar charts? 241206f96c296caf0a6c1c731ea7074baca39749.png

to represent data over time you can use the column charts feature, no?

law1
Participant II

Hey Will,

My use case is wanting to looking at days as a dimension (x-axis) and counts on the y-axis. What you’re recommending works but if a group, e.g. 2-3 days, does not have any values, that bar wouldn’t show whereas a real histogram there would be a blank.

Alison1
Participant IV

@law1 You can find an alternative answer to that question here: How to zero fill dates in Looker

Bridge
Participant III

The challenge with the tiers is that it means you already know what the bins should be. It would be helpful if Looker is about “discovery” to allow for more on the fly binning during the discovery / exploration phase.

Has there been any work on this? Being able to create a histogram from a specific column would be a game changing feature for my organization. Having to create a tiered dimension is a pain point and it seems like a basic feature other platforms (like Tableau) offer.

Most basic plotting tools and libraries have histogram functions… shouldn’t an advanced analytics platform like looker also have histograms ? I mean this isn’t rocket science

er1k
Participant V

Any progress with this?

+1 from our company

Still no update on this one currently, but I hear the desire for it in this thread and our product team is definitely aware of it.

+1 on this as well.

+1 on Histogram as well

er1k
Participant V

Any updates here?

mlantink
Participant III

+1 definitely

+1 here as well!

Katrien
Participant I

+1 for histograms, seems so basic…

nanotellez
Participant I

+1 on histograms!

Lior_Lavi
Participant I

+1 on histograms!

+1 to Histograms!

+1 on histograms

+1 with a strong desire for histograms! I’d love to use Looker for more EDA but the lack of histograms makes it cumbersome.

+1 for histograms

+1 for histograms

+1 on histograms!

Important to be able to set a lower and upper bound and bin size. Ideally we should be able to histogram on the complete data, and not only on the visible rows.

  • 1 for histogramss

+1 for histograms without having to make a tier dimension.

Hey patient Lookers,

Histograms are here! We now have a custom viz (built by Looker) available in the marketplace to install: 

Just go to: https://<yourinstancename>.looker.com/marketplace/view/viz-histogram

You can see the README here: https://github.com/llooker/viz-histogram-marketplace/blob/master/README.md

Let us know what you think, or hey— make a pull request if you have any tweaks. It’s open source :grinning: .

The 5,000 row limit makes this not very useful for us, I would love to see a histogram visualization that handles aggregating arbitrarily large datasets, similar to what you can do with tiles in a map chart.

In fact there is a whole category of visualizations of distributions (histograms, density plots, heatmaps, scatterplots, etc) which would be really great to have as custom visualizations

Thanks for the add. I think this should be available without install a viz since making a histogram is one of the first things you do when exploring a dataset. The 5000 row limitation is also a limitation that would be very helpful to overcome.

I’ll add that when I first switched to simple_histogram in the viz settings, the default color was white so the whole thing was invisible. I thought it wasn’t working until I played around with the settings. 

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