Item: Looker
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our main use case is to prepare dashboards showing the status of our internal work queue based on a Google Sheet that contains all the queue elements. We show graphs and KPIs such as the number of elements, the number of elements that exceeded a certain number of days, the average number of days to close them, the distribution across the different subteams, and the distribution per status.

Pros and Cons

It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
The look and feel is modern and nice.
It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.

I’d like a bit more personalization, particularly in the “Style” section (e.g., fonts, paragraph settings, the ability to map the axis labels to shorter names…).
Performance can be quite slow when there are many graphs on one page, even making the page unresponsive sometimes.
I’d love to be able to easily embed a dashboard in the Google Sheets it comes from (without injecting code to embed the HTML).

Return on Investment

Saved hours manually filtering a Google Sheet to extract some metrics.
It saved money compared to other data visualization tools that require an expensive license.
Very easy to engage other users to access the dashboard and check the info there.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Cloud, ThoughtSpot and Google Sheets

I choose Looker when I need quick charts. It is easier to start and configure, browser-based, and easy to connect with Google Sheets. This gives it a good competitive advantage when comparing pricing—other similar tools have expensive licenses. In a corporate Google environment, it is very easy to incorporate the use of Looker into our daily lives, both for retrospective analysis and for current status visualization.

Key Insights

Do you think Looker delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Looker's feature set?

Yes

Did Looker live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Looker go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Looker again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Cloud, ThoughtSpot, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Jira Software, Azure DevOps Services, Miro

Likelihood to Recommend

Quick dashboards from Google Sheets - Easier to do the graphs than in Google Sheets - Operational dashboards to be used in the day-to-day work - It is good both for retrospective data and to do a pulse check of the current status - Better for not giant amounts of data and not multiple data sources. - If you need a lot of graphs to be displayed on the same page, it can be a bit glitchy during configuration (then the use works fine).

Looker: easy, quick, and very well integrated with Google Sheets.

Overall Satisfaction with Looker