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The Looker Studio interface

Edit versus view mode, the panels, and how a report is structured.

What you'll be able to do
  • Navigate the editing interface
  • Switch between edit and view mode
  • Describe how reports, pages and components relate

Reports, pages, components

A report is the whole document. It contains one or more pages, and each page holds components — charts, tables, scorecards, controls, text and images.

Unlike a spreadsheet, nothing snaps to a grid by default. Components float wherever you place them, which is flexible and also why untidy reports are so common.

Edit and view mode

The toggle sits top right and matters more than it first appears.

Edit shows the Data and Style panels and lets you move components. View is what your audience sees — and importantly, filters and date ranges behave differently. A filter that looks fine in edit mode can behave unexpectedly in view mode, so check both before sharing.

The right-hand panel

Select any component and the panel shows two tabs:

  • Setup — which data source, which dimensions and metrics, sorting, filters and the date range
  • Style — colours, fonts, axes, labels, borders

That split is worth internalising: what the chart shows versus how it looks. Almost every question about a chart is answered in one tab or the other.

Theme and layout

File → Theme and layout controls the whole report: canvas size, whether to fit to width, navigation type, and the colour theme.

Set the canvas size before building. Changing it later reflows everything and you will spend an hour repositioning components.

Key points
  • Setup controls what a chart shows; Style controls how it looks
  • Always check a report in view mode before sharing
  • Set canvas size before building, not after
Check yourself