HowTo Video Tutorial Script (514 words)

In previous videos we talked about viewing dashboards, which are essentially a collection of tiles that contain the answers to a set of questions about our data. If we want to make permanent changes to the dashboard we would click ‘Edit’, which we’ll discuss in the editing dashboards video.

For the rest of the video we’ll be talking about changes you can make that don’t affect anyone else, such as changing filter values. If the dashboard was created with adjustable filters we can change them to limit the report to just the information we’re interested in right now.

Click the filters drop down and then set the filter values as desired. For now we’ll just tell this dashboard to show us the data for California and just the past 30 days. Remember to hit the ‘Run’ button in the upper right after making any changes.

Dashboard filters affect each tile differently depending on how the dashboard was set up. Dashboards can be configured so that some tiles listen to the filters and others simply ignore them.For example, we can see that our customers by state tile is showing data for all the states not just California, meaning that the tile is set to ignore the filter on state.

These settings can be changed in edit mode, which we’ll discuss in the editing dashboards video. We have the option to hide values in a visualization by clicking on their label. Here we have two pie charts, one showing our female customers and how they became our customer. and one for males. If we only want to see our customers coming from Facebook and email we can click the other labels to temporarily remove them from the visualization.

In this example we can see our order count for the past 30 days. We can quickly see the average shipping time for the orders by clicking on ‘Order Count’ to turn it on or off. In the upper right the dashboard shows what time zone is being used. If your Looker administrator has enabled user specific time zones, Looker will provide a menu for choosing your time zone.

You can click the current time zone to select a new one. When selecting a time zone there are a few different options. We can choose to have all tiles run in the time zone in which they were saved or have all tiles run in your default time zone.

Click any of the other time zones listed in the drop down to have all tiles run in that time zone. If your administrator has enabled user specific time zones you can change the time zone you want to use as a default by clicking your profile button. Then click account.  Use this drop-down to pick the desired time zone.

Thanks for watching in this tutorial we talked about making temporary changes to dashboards. The topics in this video are discussed on this page in Loocker’s documentation. To learn more about dashboards including creating and editing them you may want to check out these pages in Looker’s documentation.