Let’s discover “Query Result Variables” or “Chips” inside Looker Studio, a freshly released feature at the same time than 2 other important additions (responsive layouts & modern charts).
Definition and use cases
Query Result Variables are insertions of dynamic data in your text elements. You can take advantage of these variables for a lot of use cases:
- Creating a McKinsey title highlighting dynamic data as a chart title
- Building a descriptive text combining several observations with the related dynamic data
- Decorating a chart with a specific data label without creating a single-row table chart, like we have to do before
- Commenting the data displayed in a dashboard in a side note to provide contexts for specific numbers of dimensions values
- …
Technically, Query Result Variables are stored at the report level, like text elements, but dependent to a single data source.
How to add a query result variable
To add a Query Result Variable in your text element, you need to enter “@” character. A contextual menu will appear to create or select a variable. Parameters can also be inserted in a text element as a “chip”.
Data Selection
The value of the variable is based on the selection of a column and a row index in a table built as the data set with the following options:
- Data Source
- Dimensions (between 0 and 10) with an option to customize data type
- Metric: A unique optional metric with option to overwrite
- data type
- display format
- aggregation
- comparison calculation
- running calculation
- A single sort field (descending or ascending)
- Date range
- Filters
Styles Customization
When you create a variable (or a parameter) the main style attributes of the chip are part of the configuration:
- the text color
- the background color of the chip
If you need to display the same data with different colors, you need to create several variables.
The other text style customizations like the font or the text size are directly inherited from the text element configuration.
After the creating of the variable, you need to adapt the line height of your text element after the integration of the chip. Otherwise, during my tests, the chip is displayed as an exposent.
Access to variables
The variables of your report are also available in a specific panel “Manage variables (parameters)” accessible through the “Resource” menu. The same panel includes query result variables & parameters. This list allows you to edit, duplicate or remove existing variables.
Additionally, in the data sources list panel , you will find the number of variables created for each data source.
Query Result Variable – Demo Video
Additional Remarks and Limitations
At last here some additional remarks:
- Query Result Variables can display values from data sources but not from data blending for the moment
- Query Result Variables are available only from text elements
- The insertion in text elements are based on text cast after formatting, so Image type will be transformed to text URLs
So, a quite sophisticated feature, and for the future, against some unlocking, I let you imagine which legacy limitations would disappear. It is probably just the beginning.
At last, to get more and official information about this feature, an documentation is available.
Now, it is your turn to test query result variables.
