Looker Connect Training
Help Center
Documentation
Community
Cloud Certifications

- - Knowledge base
Product Announcements
Events
Groups

Community
The Kitchen Table

The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2115 Topics

Most replies

Recently active Most views Newest first

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What happens when an embed user connects to looker but the user already exists as a regular user in looker?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 2020 In this case a new embedded user would be created. There is no way to tie an embed user created from a script to a regular user. For any embedded user that gets created, the primary key/identifier is the external_user_id field that gets passed in.Since the embed user will be separate from the regular Looker user, and you can only have one Looker session in your browser, this also means that logging in as the embed user will log you out of your regular Looker session. Users can log in as the embed user in an incognito window if they want to avoid interrupting their existing regular Looker user session. This content is subject to limited support.

1853

1 year ago

Pieter_DeVriesLooker Staff

asked in Technical Tips & Tricks

More than three conditional/dynamic value formats. INCLUDING negative numbers

Those sweet sweet Bs Ms and Ks Huge shoutout goes to @Hugo_Selbie who came up with this formula. dimension: value { sql: CAST(${TABLE}.value as integer) ;; type: number html: {% if value > 1000000000 %} ${{value | divided_by: 1000000000 | round:2 }}B {% elsif value >= 1000000 and value < 1000000000 %} ${{value | divided_by: 1000000 | round:2 }}M {% elsif value >= 1000 and value < 1000000 %} ${{value | divided_by: 1000 | round:2 }}K {% elsif value >= 0 and value < 1000 %} ${{value | round:2 }} {% elsif value > -1000 and value < 0 %} ${{value | round:2 }} {% elsif value > -1000000 and value <= -1000 %} ${{value | divided_by: 1000 | round:2 }}k {% elsif value > -1000000000 and value <= -1000000 %} ${{value | divided_by: 1000000 | round:2 }}M {% elsif value <= -1000000000 %}

1 year ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Do we have a Pareto visualization?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 14, 2020 No, but there exists a Feature Request.However, we can imitate a Pareto chart by creating a few table calculations. Create a table calculation to compute the relative running total of the original measure. In this example, “orders.count” will be our starting measure. running_total(${orders.count})/sum(${orders.count}) Plot the new table calculation as a line. Plot the original measure as a bar. Create a table calculation for an 80% benchmark of the original measure. max(${orders.count})*0.8 Plot the benchmark as a line and add it to the same axis as the original measure.The final result will look something like this:An imitation Pareto chart using table calculations. This content is subject to limited support.

6963

1 year ago

Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Mirror SAML Groups (idP group name matches Looker group name)Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 19, 2020 When "Mirror SAML Groups" is toggled on in your instance's SAML settings, it will create a new group in Looker based off of the IdP-side group you input.A question was asked, "if the IdP side group has the same name as an existing Looker group, will saving those settings merge the two groups together in Looker?" No, SAML-mapped groups are treated as a separate thing and if the group name you save when "Mirror SAML Groups" is toggled on matches the name of an existing Looker group you will see the below error when trying to save your SAML settings.group named <name of group> already exists. 'saml_group'. This content is subject to limited support.

4463

1 year ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

LanLooker Staff

published in Blog Archives

About "Blog Archives"

This subcategory contains all of the technical content from the deprecated Looker Blog (https://looker.com/blog).We will not be updating Blog Archive content, nor do we guarantee that everything is up-to-date. If you’re looking for officially supported resources, you can always visit our Help Center and review our Docs.

2893

9 months ago

Pieter_DeVriesLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Create Day of Quarter in Table CalcKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 15, 2021 This requires 3 easy steps of Table Calc magic.Here is a picture to get an idea.The steps are belowCreate an extract months table calcextract_months(${table.date}) Create an extract days table calcextract_days(${table.date}) Create Days of Quarter, referencing the month and adding days to the days based on quarter.if(${month} = 2, ${day_of_month} + 31, if(${month} = 3, ${day_of_month} + 31 + 28, if(${month} = 5, ${day_of_month} + 31, if(${month} = 6, ${day_of_month} + 30 + 31, if(${month} = 8, ${day_of_month} + 31, if(${month} = 9, ${day_of_month} + 31 + 30, if(${month} = 11, ${day_of_month} + 31, if(${month} = 12, ${day_of_month} + 31 + 30, ${day_of_month}))))))))The above is a potential use case for this! Good luck! This content is subject to limited support.

5563

1 year ago

izzyGood Looker

published in DCL Mic Drops

DCL Mic Drop: Luka FontanillaMic Drop

Introducing DCL Mic DropsThe Department of Customer Love (DCL) is Looker’s all-knowing support team. Yes, they're actually called that. They’re kind of the brains behind this whole operation! You may have talked to them via support chat or on a ticket, or maybe even in the Looker Community. Talking to DCL, I frequently have thoughts like “How is this person so smart?” or “Wow, why didn’t I know that?” It turns out that they religiously commit that bevy of knowledge to a secret internal knowledge base that’s never before seen the light of day… Until now. Starting today, every month a different member of the Department of Customer Love will take 5 of their favorite internal knowledge articles and declassify them, for the entire community to see. They’ll also give a little peek into their life and who they are, so you can say hi the next time you see them on chat.This month, we’ve got @lukas.fontanilla sharing his top 5 never-before-published nuggets of wisdom from our internal knowledge

7563

1 year ago

ruth.mcelroyLooker Staff

asked in Technical Tips & Tricks

User does not have bigquery.jobs.create permission in project error

If we are hitting the error “BigQuery connection is hitting this error User does not have bigquery.jobs.create permission in project `project_name`” for a connection where we have granted the user the BigQuery Data Editor and BigQuery Job User role already then we may need to check our value for the `Project Name` parameter in the connection.For bigQuery connections `Project Name` in the connection panel needs to be the `Google project ID` rather than the name per our docs here. In this example we click on the project name Actions in the BQ console which shows us the project ID is actions-279322. actions-279322 is the value we need for our looker connection in this case:

11 months ago

molly.lippsettLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Is there a way to do an "IN" or "contains" function in liquid?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 17, 2020 Yep!For example, this liquid will turn the background color of a value red if the value contains "Test":sql: ${TABLE}.field_name;; html: {% if value contains "Test" %} <p style="color: black; background-color: red; font-weight:bold">{{ rendered_value }}</p> {% else %} {{ rendered_value }} {% endif %} ;; This content is subject to limited support.

4593

11 months ago

vishal.dharmadhikariLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I update my dashboard with a new custom slug using update_dashboard?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 10, 2021 Yes, we can update the dashboard with a custom slug but please note dashboard slugs are required to be 22 characters long.If we try to use the update_dashboard endpoint with a slug that's less than 22 characters, we'll see the following error message. # Node SDKconst dashboard = await lookerSDK.ok(lookerSDK.dashboard("123"))const test = await lookerSDK.update_dashboard("123", {slug: "slugtest"});# Results in this errorerror: {message: 'The first argument must be one of type string, Buffer, ArrayBuffer, Array, or Array-like Object. Received type undefined',type: 'sdk_error'}, This content is subject to limited support.

4403

3 months ago

vishal.dharmadhikariLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why can't I see my explore in the Explore drop-down menu?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 31, 2020 First confirm that the Explore has been saved and then refresh the page to see if the explore is populating in the Explore dropdown.If the explore still isn't showing in the Explore menu, check if:The extension: required parameter is defined in the Explore. An Explore with extension: required is not visible to users on its own; it is intended only to act as a starting point to be extended by other Explores (documentation). The required_access_grants parameter is used on the Explore. If this parameter is used and a user doesn't have the necessary corresponding user attribute values, they won't be able to see the Explore in the dropdown menu (documentation). If the Explore is extending an Explore, check whether the base/extended Explore has hidden: yes defined.There is also a known issue in which if there is more than one model with the same name, the explore menu will sometimes show the explores from the unconfigured model instead of the explores from the confi

18603

7 months ago

adina.katzLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Filter a column on multiple values from another columnKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 7, 2019 Say you want to filter a column by multiple values in a "sub column", i.e you have a column order id's and a column product id's, and you want to filter for order id's that contain product id A AND product id B.The issue: You can't use a custom filter because that filter is a row based filter and won't account for multiple row values of product id for one value of order id.The bad solution: You can use a PDT to filter on product id A then filter on product id B in the explore (or in a derived table with the filter for A as a sub select)The better solution: A group concatenation aggregate function! How this works: The aggregate function works like any other function and will concat values based on the grouping. Implementation: We can either useApproach 1: Create measure type listmeasure: product_id_list { type: list list_field: product_id;;} Approach 2: Create measure of type string and use appropriate sql dialect for group_concatmeasure: group_concat_product_

12923

1 month ago

Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I temporarily stop or pause a scheduled look or dashboard from going out?Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: Oct 2, 2020 Not natively in the product, but there is a feature request.Basic WorkaroundIn order to stop a scheduled look or dashboard, the user has to delete it entirely from the schedules tab in the admin pane. They would then need to recreate the schedule when they want it back.Alternative Basic WorkaroundThrough the update_schedule_plan() endpoint, we can set the "enabled'"parameter to "false". This disables the schedule, without fully deleting it. It tells Looker to skip over any possible runs for this schedule - the only nuance with this method is that if we did skip over any runs while it was disabled, when we enable this again it will run once (no matter how many skipped runs happen) right away.Other WorkaroundIf you host your own instance, you can restart looker with startup flag options to stop schedules ---scheduler-threads=0 will disable the scheduler -BUT once you bring it back, the backlogged schedules will need to runAnother workaround we can try is using a

13893

9 months ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I migrate dashboards between instances?Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: March 21, 2021Here are three options: Make all the UDDs into LookML dashboards, connect the Git repo to the new instance, and then make the LookML dashboards back into UDDs. This Help Center article outlines the manual steps. Use Gazer, a command line tool that migrates content between instances.Please note that this tool is open source and it is not supported by Looker’s normal support channels. It may be possible to purchase support from Looker’s Professional Services team. We are hoping that a community will grow around this tool, however, and support/enhance it further. Issues can be logged at https://github.com/deangelo-llooker/gzr/issues. Clone the instance's internal database completely. This brings in and overwrites all dashboards, Looks, users, folders, and everything that's stored in the internal database. It's recommended to only use this option when you want to migrate all the content and metadata from one instance to another. One use case for this is when

14753

10 months ago

Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

My LookML Validator is slow!Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 25, 2020 TL;DR:The bigger the project is, the longer it takes to validate. Quick wins:Be strategic about your "includes" Always including every other view may be easy for development but being strategic by using naming conventions to only include the necessary files will increase performance. Comment or delete unused explores (and joins, fields, etc) Consider splitting your project into multiple projectsCheck out this article for LookML best practices. Long answer:LookML project size (total number of lines) and unnecessary includes both affect the performance of the LookML validator.Validation is a two-step process; 1) the first pass of validation happens by loading every single file in the project, even the ones not referenced anywhere, into memory and does a full translation of the source code one model at a time looking for "compile" errors. 2) the second pass of validation starts at each model and then parses only the files referenced by that model. And then it bu

9882

1 year ago

MichaelMember

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Important: Supportability of Knowledge Drops

We will not be updating Knowledge Drop content, nor do we guarantee that everything is up-to-date. The timestamp published on each Knowledge Drop denotes when it was last verified. We have spent years building up this treasure trove of insightful Looker tips, tricks, and how-to’s, but given how quickly Looker has evolved, we never expected this content to stay bleeding-edge forever. Think of these Drops as point-in-time insights that were once important enough for us to document. That said, there’s a TON of extremely valuable and useful pieces of Looker knowledge here! We hope it inspires you to explore, learn, and engage with your fellow community members! If you have questions on these articles, please reply on the post for Community help! Plus, if you’re looking for officially supported resources, you can always visit our Help Center and review our Docs.

30182

2 months ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why can't I access chat?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: April 2021 If you don't see the chat option in the Help Menu:Permissions: Anyone with the develop permission can come on chat. This means that admins have this capability too. Check if the user is missing the develop permission.License type: If you have a partner license type you will not have chat access starting April 1st 2021. As for trials, trials which were initiated after Jan 5th 2021 will not have chat feature toggled on. However, the trials that were initiated before that are being turned off in a phased manner.Closed ports: If your Looker instance is customer-hosted, then your network administrator needs to open several ports on your server to connect to the chat client. If you see the chat option in the Help Menu, but clicking on it doesn't bring up the chat widget:Browser extensions: If you do not see the chat option in the help menu, but clicking it does not bring up the chat widget, check in incognito mode. Often times we've seen extensions such as Ghostery ca

11522

6 months ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How can I recover a deleted Look or Dashboard if the trash is emptied?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: March 2021 As of 4.8+, all deleted content goes to the Trash Folder. It stays there indefinitely until deleted by an admin. Any content can be restored from the Trash Folder by an admin.This card talks about how to find and restore a deleted Look or dashboard with i__looker, in the case where the deleted content has also been deleted from the Trash.If you accidentally deleted a Look or dashboard AND deleted the trash, it's possible to recover this Look or dashboard using Looker's internal model, i__looker. i__looker is the model underlying the Usage Panel in the Admin section.Recovering a deleted Look that is no longer in the trash Go to the history explore of the i__looker model. You can get there by navigating to a URL of the form: https://company.looker.com/explore/i__looker/historyReplace company.looker.com with your Looker instance's specific URL. If you know a specific time that the Look was queried, filter on History - Created Time for as specific a range as possi

37582

11 months ago

Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Add a total's column to a stacked bar chartKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 14, 2020 Using Table Calculations, you can add a total column to a stacked bar chart. (Note: If your bar chart is not stacked, you can add a total column by simply checking the row totals box and pivoting on your dimension)METHOD 1: TOTAL COLUMN WITH BREAKDOWNStep 1: Configure your explore section so that it has one extra row than the number that you need to display. For example, in this graph we only want to display March - July, but we'll want to add 1 extra row so that we can display a total column at the end.Step 2: Create two table calculations. The first will create a column that displays the total of the series if it is the max row in the data set. The second will create a column that displays the word "Total" if it is the max row in the data set. Step 3: Hide your original dimension and measure from the visualization so that only the table calculations and the pivoted columns remain in the visualization.METHOD 2: TOTAL COLUMN WITHOUT BREAKDOWN (PRESERVES DR

18772

6 months ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do you reference a yesno dimension field value?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: March 2021Looker’s “yesno” dimensions return boolean values (TRUE or FALSE) rather than a string “yes” or “no”. For this reason, when SQL is involved, you don’t need to write “field == yes”, you can simply write “field”, as this will return TRUE or FALSE by itself. Here are specific examples depending on where you’d like to reference it: SQL:You can treat it as a boolean.sql: CASE WHEN ${field} THEN ...Filtered Measure: measure: first_purchase_count { type: count filters:[is_first_purchase:"Yes"]Liquid HTML{% if value == 'Yes' %} will do it.Note: it is case sensitive.Templated filter:We put a boolean in between the condition, like:derived_table: {sql:SELECT murder FROM public.rawhere {% condition filter %} murder=10 {% endcondition %} ;; }dimension: filter {type: yesnosql: ${TABLE}.murder=10;;} cite docs for type yesno , docs for filtered measures and docs for liquid variables This content is subject to limited support.

79682

1 year ago

samLooker Staff

published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can LookML dashboards be moved to another folder?Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: March 22, 2021No. LookML dashboards can only live in the LookML dashboard folder. There is this product feedback to allow functionality to move them out of the LookML dashboard folder so that they can live in other folders.As a workaround, when viewing a LookML dashboard, we can click "Copy from LookML into a folder" (documentation) from the gear menu. This will make a UDD copy of that dashboard in the folder we choose. This content is subject to limited support.

12992

8 months ago

Page 2 / 85

Badges

sbrylowskihas earned the badge Friendly Face
carriehas earned the badge Helpful
carriehas earned the badge Community Star
carriehas earned the badge Friendly Face
Dawidhas earned the badge Community Star

Show all badges

Sign up

Already have an account? Login

Social Login

Username *

E-mail address *

Company

(Private)

Only you and moderators can see this information

Password *

I accept the Terms of Service.

If you’re an EEA-based consumer of digital content, services, or goods, and you’ve agreed to our Terms of Service, then EEA consumer laws provide you with a legal guarantee. Under this guarantee, we’re liable for any lack of conformity that you discover for the one-time supply of digital content or services at any time during the “continuous” supply of digital content or services.
Your national laws may provide an even longer guarantee. Your rights under these legal guarantees aren’t limited by any other commercial guarantees that we provide. If you want to make a guarantee claim or if you would like to delete your account data, please contact us lookerconnect-help@google.com.

loginBox.register.email_repeat

Login to the community

No account yet? Create an account

Social Login

Username or Email

Password

Remember me

Forgot password?

Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.

Username or e-mail

Back to overview

Scanning file for viruses.

Sorry, we're still checking this file's contents to make sure it's safe to download. Please try again in a few minutes.

This file cannot be downloaded

Sorry, our virus scanner detected that this file isn't safe to download.

The Kitchen Table

What happens when an embed user connects to looker but the user already exists as a regular user in looker?Knowledge Drop

More than three conditional/dynamic value formats. INCLUDING negative numbers

Do we have a Pareto visualization?Knowledge Drop

Mirror SAML Groups (idP group name matches Looker group name)Knowledge Drop

How to Add Images to Visualizations

Can you embed a Looker iframe in PowerPoint / Google Slides?Knowledge Drop

Using Liquid Split and Array Filters to Format Lists

Dashboard-next descriptionKnowledge Drop

About "Blog Archives"

Create Day of Quarter in Table CalcKnowledge Drop

DCL Mic Drop: Luka FontanillaMic Drop

User does not have bigquery.jobs.create permission in project error

Is there a way to do an "IN" or "contains" function in liquid?Knowledge Drop

Can I update my dashboard with a new custom slug using update_dashboard?Knowledge Drop

Why can't I see my explore in the Explore drop-down menu?Knowledge Drop

Filter a column on multiple values from another columnKnowledge Drop

Can I temporarily stop or pause a scheduled look or dashboard from going out?Knowledge Drop

How do I migrate dashboards between instances?Knowledge Drop

My LookML Validator is slow!Knowledge Drop

Important: Supportability of Knowledge Drops

Why can't I access chat?Knowledge Drop

How can I recover a deleted Look or Dashboard if the trash is emptied?Knowledge Drop

Add a total's column to a stacked bar chartKnowledge Drop

How do you reference a yesno dimension field value?Knowledge Drop

Can LookML dashboards be moved to another folder?Knowledge Drop

Badges

Sign up

Social Login

Login to the community

Social Login

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded