The Podium - May 1st, 2019

Izzy Miller, Community Manager at Looker

May 1, 2019

Hello there, good Lookers!

Wishing you all a happy May Day today (wow, it’s already May!) A couple of fun reminders to share —

Whether you’re still spinning out from the most recent episode or you just love all things data, don’t forget to check out our Gender Analysis of Game of Thrones data. Find something that surprised you or your own interesting tidbit? Hop into the Community and share it us and your fellow GoT/data fans.

Also, super excited to share that if you’re a developer, coder, or all-around data lover in Europe, we’re having our first-ever London Hackathon on May 17th! Full details for the event are coming soon, so be sure to register so you can get all the details.

Izzy Miller
Community Manager, Looker

Questions and Answers

Hiding Fields Based On Permissions

Dawid_Nawrot started a major discussion about the best way to conditionally hide some fields from the UI, while still allowing queries containing them to be run by all users. Check out the full thread here.
Looker Community Discussion — Hiding fields based on permissions

YTD / Previous Year Fields

Bens came through with some great examples of how to do Year To Date calculations using a yesno field - awesome stuff, Bens!
Looker Community Discussion — YTD and Previous year dimensions

Community Spotlight — Jonathan Palmer

Our guest this week is @Jonathan_Palmer. Welcome, Jonathan!

What do you do for work?

I’m the Head of BI at GoCardless, a London-based recurring payments platform.

What’s your secret skill or talent?

I can play Sweet Child O’ Mine on the ukulele.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever done with Looker?

Driven successful adoption. I was lucky enough to lead taking King from 0 to 800+ users in 9 months, and now at GoCardless we’ve gone from 0 to 270 (85% of the company) highly engaged users in 4 months.

Most useful Looker feature?

Surely the answer has to be LookML? Abstracting SQL is a win for the BI pro and the end user: less code and more flexibility without compromising accuracy.

Pie chart or bar chart?

Histogram :wink:

What’s your favorite part of the Looker Community

It’s great to see a proper Feature Requests section now. Would love to see more people using it and making the product roadmap more democratic.

What’s your biggest feature request?

An extendable and full history i__looker model, out of the box. Understanding Looker usage data is hugely important to driving adoption, so making this as easy as possible would be awesome.

Favorite London Tube stop?

St John’s Wood — because it is the only tube stop with none of the letters of the word ‘mackerel’ in it, obviously.

Community Knowledge Share

Looker Life Hacks

This is the mother of all knowledge sharing! @nicholaswongsg kicked off a mega-thread of members sharing their nifty Looker tricks and tips. Read the whole thing for an instant Looker level-up.
Looker Community Discussion — Looker Life Hacks

Tricky templated filters

Sam_Asher resurrected an old question from 2016 and dropped in some additional knowledge about suggesting one value in a filter, but inserting an associated value in the SQL.
Looker Community Discussion — Tricky templated filters

Join the Conversation

There you have it! Head over to the Community to add your own life hacks and throw Jonathan some :heart:. Share with us your comments about any specific discussions and tips that have helped you out lately. And of course, send in your questions for the next Spotlight feature.