Looker Studio – Tricks on how to connect a control to a single graph

Hey, everyone. Ryan Bowse from SchoolBI here. I’d like to welcome you to our first inaugural tips and tricks video about liquor studio. We’ve heard loud and clear from schools that they’d love to learn more about how to use liquor studio in their day to day dashboarding needs, So these videos are designed to show you bite sized consumable ways to get more out of using liquor studio. Today’s topic, which I am very, very excited to share, is a way to connect a data control to a specific graph.

If you’ve worked with looker before, you know that controls are one of the most powerful things you can do for a dashboard. For those that have never used controls before, I’m sure you’ll get to know them pretty fast.

They’re up here in the toolbar all you have to do is hit add control and you can bring in one of these data controls. And the idea of a data control is it allows the user to have a drop down to control the different things that are shown in a graph. Now, by default, when you drag a control onto a dashboard, that control governs all of the graphs on the page by default.

So if I wanna actually change which city to be representing here in my enrollment household dashboard, I could click San Francisco. And when I do that, you’ll see that both graphs on the left hand side will change based on that selection.

However, a lot of the time, you may not want your control to govern all the graphs on a page. So what do you do? It can be really annoying, and there’s a lot of, ways to actually do this. But one of the most simple is one of the ways I was gonna show you today. And that is if you only wanted this control to govern this graph, it’s as simple as making sure that that control is highlighted.

Holding the shift key and then selecting the graph that you wanted to control.

You can see both items are selected. I right click on one of the items. And all I have to do is hit group.

Once I hit group, then I can actually come in here, select the city, and it will only affect this dashboard. So I’ll show you that right now.

There you go. And what’ll happen is you’ll see that on the left hand side, this graph will only present the information based on this control the table down, but here down here, the other graph or the graphical representation is not affected by any of the selections up here. So I just wanted to show you that a real simple way to make your life a lot easier.

I’d love to hear from you what you’d like to know from Looker because I love building these out, and thanks for watching.