Preview your data

To better understand the shape of your data, you can preview it in Looker Studio. This article explains how to preview your data by using the data source editor.

Open the Data Preview pane

To preview your data for a data source, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the list of fields for a data source.
   • When you create a new data source, Looker Studio automatically takes you to this page after you connect your data.
   • For an existing data source, edit the data source. You can edit a data source from within a report or from the Looker Studio home page.
2. In the bottom left corner of the page, click Data Preview.

Preview different sets of fields

To preview data for a set of fields, follow these steps:

1. In the left-hand panel, select the fields that you'd like to preview in the Dimensions and Metrics sections.
   • You can also search for fields using the search bar.
   • You cannot select more than the maximum number of fields. Looker Studio displays the maximum number of fields at the bottom of the Data Preview pane.
2. To select or deselect all fields, click the Select All checkbox next to the search bar above the fields.
   • If the number of fields in the data source is greater than the maximum number of fields that can be selected, the Select All checkbox will be disabled. Looker Studio displays the maximum number of fields at the bottom of the Data Preview pane.
3. In the bottom left corner of the window, click Refresh preview to generate a data preview for the selected set of fields.

Notes

Note the following limitations that you will encounter while previewing your data:

• You cannot manually set the widths of columns.
• The Data Preview pane doesn't include parameters.
• Depending on your data source, the number of fields that you can preview may be limited. Looker Studio displays this limit at the bottom of the Data Preview pane. For example, you can only preview 100 dimensions and 100 metrics for Google Sheets data sources.
• The Data Preview pane can display a maximum of 1,000 rows.

• The Data Preview pane is only available for the following data sources:

  • Google BigQuery
  • Google Sheets
  • Looker
  • Microsoft Excel
  • CSV upload