Looker Studio Infographic
I was working on creating some school library infographic templates, and I thought..."this would be more awesome if the numbers/stats could automatically update." So this is one option. Looker Studio is a data visualization and report tool from Google. These directions should help get you started with Looker Studio. I also created a video that walks through these same steps if you prefer that format. Here's a link to a finished version to help give you some ideas. Good luck!!!
Create a new Google Form to collect your library statistics. This form is basically for you and, if you are lucky enough, your co-librarian or assistant. It will be the tool that makes it simple to capture daily, weekly, and/or monthly data. Here is a link to copy a form that I used, but totally feel free to use your own.
Create your questions. These are the things you will measure. Circulations, weeding, visits, collaborations, tech tickets... it really depends on the characteristics of your program. I really like the ones that involve students, though.
Quantitative data is easier to track in the spreadsheet, so be sure to choose "Short answer text" as your question type.
When you collect the data (submit the form), you don't necessarily have to answer every question every time.
UPDATE: Looker Studio has some awesome tools to help filter results by date, BUT, this works better if your form questions do not have words like "week" "day" or "month" in them. Looker Studio thinks these results are dates, and it messes things up. Avoid these words.
Fill out your new form a few times. Again, to keep track of these numbers, you don't have to answer every question every time you fill it out. I thought I might even use it as I worked with a class or another teacher or right after adding some books to the collection.
Once you have filled out your new form a few times, click on the "Responses" link at the top.
Next, click on "Link to Sheets." This will create a Google Sheets spreadsheet which will feed the Looker Studio dashboard.
A window will pop up for the destination of the form data. "Create a new spreadsheet" is generally the default. It will create the spreadsheet in the same folder where your form is. Click on "Create."
Your new spreadsheet should open. You will see the submissions you've made so far. The only important thing to note here is the title of the spreadsheet at the top. You will need the name so you can choose the correct spreadsheet in Looker Studio.
Next, we need to open Looker Studio. Type the address or click on lookerstudio.google.com.
Looker Studio has some templates you can play with, but we will start with a "Blank Report." Click the plus button.
The first thing that pops up is a window asking you to choose a "data connection." Looker Studio is compatible with many data sources. We will be choosing Google Sheets here.
You will likely see your newly-created spreadsheet at the top of this list. Select it and then click the Add button.
A window will pop up. Click ADD TO REPORT.
This is the default view of your new and blank report. By default a table is created, but you can delete that as it won't really make sense in the design of our infographic. Next click on "Theme and layout."
Click on Layout. You might have to scroll down a bit, but you will see "Canvas Size." Think of this as "page setup" in Google Slides. You can choose the size of your Looker Studio report. I like 16:9 as that is generally the size of most laptops and whatnot. However, you might want a more vertical look that requires scrolling. It's totally up to you. For this example, I'm choosing 16:9 - Landscape.
One quick thing to take care of is naming your Looker Studio design. It's very similar to Docs and Slides.
Next, add a text box for our design's "Header" or title. This works much like a text box in Google Slides.
Font, size, color, and all the things can be changed here. I usually take a second to size the "box" to the same size as my text. This makes it easier to select and move later on as we finish the infographic.
Next, we will add our first bit of data from our form/spreadsheet. First, click on "Add a chart" and then choose the first "Scorecard" option.
Next, drag to create a "box" for the scorecard chart.
I'm pausing for a breath. 😅 There are a lot of steps here but hang in there. By default, the "Metric" is Record Count. We don't want that. We want the number of books circulating. Select and drag the "How many books were checked out th.." field to the "Metric" section. You can just drop it on to of "Record Count" and it will replace it.
Success! We now have our dynamic and auto-updating book checkout SUM, but it's too small, and that label above it looks like junk. To change this click on the "STYLE" section of the scorecard chart.
Change the text size to "auto." This way, the size of the number will adjust to fit the size of the scorecard box. Checking the "Hide Metric Name" box will remove that default field label.
Now we will create our own label, that works for our infographic design. (Bonus tip... I often just select existing text in the design, hit CTRL+C to copy, and then CTRL+V to paste instead of going through the steps of adding a new text box.)
Speaking of copying and pasting... For our remaining metrics, I'm going to copy the scorecard and text box we made, paste them, and then change the data metrics to the correct field.
Ok... I'm unsure if this will happen to you, but it's happened to me multiple times. Everything was going great, changing the "Metric" to the correct fields, until I got to "teacher collaborations." You notice here that it says "Week 20." That should be a number. (If this didn't happen to you, sweet... skip the next few steps.)
UPDATE: I think I figured this out. Looker Studio believes these fields are "date" type because of our form question using words like "week" and "day." Don't use those words in your form, or follow these quick steps to change the type to "number."
It's a tiny detail, but Looker Studio, for some reason, is interpreting our "Teacher collaborations" field as a Date, instead of a Number. You can see the difference in the small green icon. We will need to change the data type for our SUM of "Teacher Collaborations" to appear correctly.
To make this change click on the "Resource" menu, and then click "Manage added data sources."
Click on "EDIT."
You can see that our "collaboration" field has "ISO Week" as the Type. Click it and selct "Numeric," then choose "Number." Go ahead and take a second to check and fix any other fields that might have the wrong data type.
Click on the "DONE" button in the upper right corner, and then click "CLOSE."
Now that all of our cards are displaying correctly, let's add a few images. I have an educator membership to the Noun Project, a huge collection of icons (which are actually offered inside of Canva and Adobe Express!). Click on the image icon, and then click "Upload from computer."
This might look a bit different if you are on a Windows computer or Chromebook. Choose your image and click Open.
Now you can move and size your images. Transparent PNG files work great. Animated GIF files are an option too!
Basic lines and shapes are also an option when creating your design.
You can change colors, borders, styles, opacity, and adjust which object shows up in front of others. The layer options are similar to what you might know from Google Slides.
Ok... Another option for you... You could do all of your infographic design work in something like Canva or Adobe Express, but leave out the numbers. Save a PNG of the design, import it into Looker Studio as we did for the icons above, then move the "scorecard" charts, (our SUMS), into place.
Ok... we are getting close! Here's one more feature you might want to try out. This control will allow you to filter your library stats by date. Since the Google form captures the submission date for every entry, you can easily use that timestamp info to show data from only the last month, last year, or a customized date range. Click "Add a control" and click on "Date range control."
Click or drag to create the date range control.
For this sweet feature to work we just need to make sure that the "Timestamp" field under the Data column is the chosen variable for the "Date Range Dimension" for EACH scorecard metric.
Once you get your text elements and cards arranged, you are ready to share! Click the "Share" button at the top of the page. The next window is very similar to other Google Drive Docs, and Slides, etc. You can also click the small triangle and get a slightly different menu. The "Get report link" actually creates a custom link with any filters you currently have applied. For example, if you filter to a specific date range, you can get a link to share with that filter already applied!
You can also embed a Looker Studio project into a Google Site. Click on the "File" menu and click "Embed report." Select "Enable embedding," input your desired size, and click "COPY TO CLIPBOARD." Using the "Embed URL" option also works well in Google Sites. This is an example of an embed of the Looker Studio report we created in this tutorial.
