You can bring data into Looker Studio from almost any source by uploading CSV (comma-separated values) files. File upload lets you report on data not supported by a specific connector.
In this article:How file upload works
When you upload a file, you add that file to a "data set." You can then create a data source based on that data set.
The data sets you create belong to you and are not shareable; however the data sources you create that are based on your data sets can be shared and edited like any other. This means your data sets can be used in shared data sources and reports, but only you can access the data set itself.
You can upload multiple files to a data set. When you add new files, that data gets appended to the data set. This makes it easy to update your data as time goes on.
Your uploaded data is stored in Google Cloud Storage. There are many benefits to this including the ability to access and download your data from the cloud, and to use other Google Cloud services with your data.
Learn more about Google Cloud Storage.
Upload file format
You should be sure that the files you upload are correctly formatted. Otherwise, errors might occur during the upload, or your data may not look right in your reports.
Probably the most common cause of content errors is improper use of separators, quotation marks, and line break characters in the uploaded data. Understanding how file upload handles these can save you trouble in the future.
UTF-8 encoding
Your upload file should be in UTF-8 encoding. This is a standard encoding for most applications on the web.
However, if you are exporting data from certain desktop products, such as Microsoft Excel™, you may need to convert your file to UTF-8 before you upload it with Looker Studio. Otherwise, Looker Studio may return an error message such as "Invalid characters in the file. Only UTF-8 encoded characters are supported."
Only tabular data
File upload can only import files of tabular data. This means your files must have a regular structure of rows and columns. Each row must have the same number of columns, even if data is missing for a particular cell in the table. Trying to upload a file with merged cells, or an inconsistent structure will fail with an upload error.
Every file you upload to a given data set must have exactly the same structure, with the same fields in the same order.
If you need to add or delete fields in an existing data set, you must delete all the previously uploaded files before uploading files with the new structure. (Or create a new data set using the new file structure.)
Separators
All the fields in your data must be separated from each other by commas.
If there are commas within the actual data in a field you want to upload, that field must be surrounded by quotes. If your data includes double quotes, you can use a single quote character to surround the field.
Header row
The first line in your file must be a header row. This row will tell Looker Studio how to name your fields. Field names must be unique, so you can't have duplicate values in your header row.
Column names must:
- Contain only letters, numbers, or underscores. Other punctuation or special characters are not allowed.
- Start with a letter or underscore
- Be at most 128 characters long
The header row must also follow the rules for separators mentioned above.
Line breaks
Each line in the file must end with a line break. File upload does not support line breaks in your data even if these are escaped by quotes.
Limits of file upload
File upload is subject to the following limits:
- 1000 data sets per user
- 2GB total storage per user
- 100 uploads per data set per day
- 100MB file size limit per data set