Introduction
Let's start by familiarizing ourselves with the Looker user interface (UI), and look at what to expect when logging in for the first time.
After logging in, Looker brings you to a page that lists your organizations' top level folder structure. To access available datasets, click on the explore button as shown below:
In this example, we'll continue working with our Users dataset (table in SQL). After clicking on Users, we land on Looker's Explore screen, where we can see the fields in the Users table:
From here, we can explore our dataset by dragging and dropping the different dimensions and measures.
To view the values in a field, we can click on the name of the field we would like to explore, and then click on Run in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The example below shows the result for the Acquisition Source field:
Sorting - Ascending and Descending
Looker makes sorting our dataset very easy, by simply clicking on the title of the field. After clicking on the title, Looker will display an arrow pointing either up or down depending on the type of sort. In the example below, we can see the arrow pointing down, indicating a sort in descending order:
Limiting the Number of Results
To limit the number of rows being returned when clicking on Run, we simply need to fill in the Row Limit box on the right hand side, and indicate how many rows we would like to return. In the example below, we're limiting results to 2 rows, and Looker even gives us a warning message to indicate that the results may not show the entire dataset:
To find the top or bottom results, we can click on the field title and Looker will do a fresh pull and display the top or bottom results based on the number set in the Row Limit.