Helpful Looker Tutorials
August 25, 2026
Explores in Looker are central to creating a powerful and flexible self-service analytics experience. They define the starting point for an analysis and enable users to dive into the data. Explores provide a way to define the scope of data to examine, and they establish the fields available for selection in a query. This article will dive into the concept of Explores in Looker, their structure, and how to create them.
Read moreAugust 25, 2026
Standing up Looker in 2026: provisioning a Looker (Google Cloud core) instance from the Cloud console, Google OAuth sign-in, connecting BigQuery or another warehouse with a service account and PDT schema, creating a LookML project in Git, and the day-one settings that save pain later.
Read moreAugust 25, 2026
Custom visualizations in Looker, done right: color collections and themes (there is no color_palette LookML parameter), Liquid conditional formatting with value and rendered_value, and a working custom visualization built on the Visualization API and installed through Admin > Platform > Visualizations or the Marketplace.
Read moreAugust 25, 2026 · Vistelio
The complete guide to row-level security in Looker: user attributes, access_filter, sql_always_where with _user_attributes, access_grant and required_access_grants, embed users, the things that silently break RLS, and how to test the boundary.
Read moreAugust 25, 2026 · Vistelio
How to use the System Activity explores (History, Field Usage, PDT Event Log, Database Performance) to find slow dashboards, prune unused fields and content, attribute warehouse cost to users and schedules, and feed the results back into the model.
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