Excel-ling
Now, you are thinking that July is the month of feature previews for Looker Studio. It is not wrong, but what is definitely true: The acceleration of the cadence of releases by Looker BI and Looker Studio teams with important features : Excel connector is coming!
Available for the moment only through a preview restricted access, the connector will be released soon and it is welcomed for a lot of Looker Studio users.
What a good idea to import Excel files in our data visualisation tool Looker Studio, like we can already do with Google Sheets online files. This time, it is about importing local files (like we can do for csv files).
Benefits and available features
In my opinion, this specific native connector will address important use cases, beyond the benefits of any data source connector inside Looker and Looker Studio:
- Store your Excel files in the Cloud and create/share a normalized access of their data
- Avoid some transformation steps when one of your source of information are delivered in Excel files
- Take advantage of the Looker / Looker Studio ecosystem, with advanced features like the much anticipated Gemini AI integration
- Use the layer of data visualisation of Looker Studio as a standard for any of your deliverables, and so, to ensure a graphical consistency, EVEN for visualisation based only on Excel data
- Load big Excel files without loading performance problems because of your tiny computer
- …
Enough speech and theory, Let’s test it!
The main features that you would except are available:
- Upload of local Excel file
- Select the sheet tab for the data source
- Choose the options to specify the range, hide rows or columns
Tests & first feedback
During my tests, I used several files with different sizes and settings. The configuration, the data loading and the use of the data source were smooth like with Google Sheets:
- Options during the data source creation
- Recognition of column field types
- …and loading time for data refresh!
One of my sample Excel file contained 280k rows and 30 columns (35 MB). I’ve created charts with very fast loading and refreshing time during the edition.
The implementation is based on the default caching mechanism of Looker Studio data sources for native connectors. Behind the scenes: Internal BigQuery tables. So, of course…it is fast ⚡️
So, very nice first impressions! I would just suggest for the future to add the possibility to select several tabs of an Excel at the same time, so to generate one data source by worksheet for the same file through one bulk action.
At last, other advanced features for the related data management and Cloud Platform are planed by the Looker team, but it is probably too soon to talk about this.
Current limitations
For the moment, what we know during this preview about the limitations of the Excel connector:
- Max supported file size currently is 100MB
- Maximum supported columns from the Excel sheet is 10k
- Only local Excel files can be uploaded (not online excel file from Office 365)
- Macros and Excel pivot tables are not supported
Demo video
At last, here a quick demo of adding an Excel data source.
I’m really curious to see how my clients will adopt this new connector in their Excel world and how we will be more efficient thanks to it. Meanwhile the release, I keep testing, trying to excel with excel data!
Great thanks to the Looker and Looker Studio team. Thanks for your amazing work, the provided information about this promising feature, and generally for their collaboration.
