Looker Studio companion is a free extension for Google Chrome browser. It is created to help users building reports and dashboards inside what is formerly known as Google Data Studio.
This plugin boosts Looker Studio user interface and features to improve your productivity & reports performance.
To install and test Looker Studio Companion
For this first version, LS companion includes the following features.
Resources
The first tab proposes resources links we frequently need when we work on Looker Studio:
- Functions reference to build calculated fields
- Regex checker to test regular expressions for our chart filters or formula functions
- Date formats reference
- Unicode characters
- Icon library
- …but also, as secondary resources…
- Looker Studio help
- Measure Slack channel dedicated to Looker Studio, the best place ❤️ to find help from power users
- LS bug trackers…sometimes, we find bug…sometimes, people already notice the same bug
- Looker Studio release notes
- Google Cloud Services Status
Data sources : Fields management
A good Looker Studio data source is a data source listing only relevant fields for your report or because of your measurement scope.
The second tab allows to load your data source fields, filter them and disable/enable through bulk actions:
- Dropdown menu to select one of your report data sources
- Button to show the related fields
- Form field to filter the list by field name (with or without regular expression)
- Bulk actions to disable or enable selected or all fields
- Fields list for selection or unitary activation/deactivation
- Footer with a count summary of dimensions and metrics
Settings
For the moment, two options are available on this tab.
Widen chart formula field
The first one allows to widen the chart formula field when you need more space to write your calculated field.
(new feature) Turn off data loading requests (save tokens for Google Analytics 4 quotas)
For users working with Google Analytics 4 direct data sources (through an outdated implementation of data API behind the scences)
Since the version 0.3 (released Feb 15, 2023) , you can now block all data loading requests temporarily, as a report editor, to reduce the number of requests and avoid to reach quotas from Google Analytics 4 data sources.
By default on edit mode, each time you change fields configuration for a specific chart, a data load is triggered through Google Analytics 4 data API, consuming tokens for concurrent requests (…so closer to quotas). And it is even worse for data source changes…all page data are reloaded.
⮕ Activating this new option from settings tab of Looker Studio Companion blocks all data refresh requests. You decide when you are ready to trigger them again.
Because of this blocking, any automatic attempt of Looker Studio to refresh automatically data will provoke a “System error” (1) on your chart but the data viz tool will not consume requests during your charts configuration.
A user info block (2) is displayed at the top right corner (header bar) to notice that the option is activated.
Of course, this activation & the related data blocking is specific to the environment of the extension user for report edition purposes. It will not solve the main problem of GA4 data request quotas, too quickly reached with Looker Studio. It is just a partial workaround for report designers.
To install and test Looker Studio Companion