By design, Looker is the enterprise semantic platform which ensures that every data set meets a high standard of accuracy by acting as a single source of truth and providing long-term consistency of your metrics. Today, we are introducing a complement to this governed framework: self-service Explores, to accelerate high-velocity, ad-hoc analysis. Self-service Explores allows you to bring your own data directly into the Looker semantic layer, providing instant access to insights while maintaining the integrity of your existing governed data ecosystem.
Data teams often find themselves caught between two worlds. On one side, there’s the trusted, governed world of modern BI, where every metric is defined and every row is verified. Then there’s the agile, anything goes nature of spreadsheets and CSV files where you can get answers in seconds but run the risk of ending up in a siloed data vacuum.
Self-service Explores bring the value of modern, governed BI to the experimentation self-starting capability of spreadsheets, allowing anyone with the right permissions to turn a flat file into a fully functional Looker Explore in seconds. You can also import from Cloud from Google Drive and quickly transform Google Sheets data into conversational analytics. No code, no waiting — just insights.
You can drag and drop a comma separated or spreadsheet file (.csv, .xls, or .xlsx) or pull directly from Google Sheets, and Looker automatically creates an Explore. Behind the scenes, these files are securely stored in your own BigQuery instance, ensuring your data remains within your controlled infrastructure.
From importing a CSV to a self-service Explore in seconds
Key capabilities to power your analysis
With Looker self-service Explores, you gain:
- Instant file uploads: Use a simple drag-and-drop interface to ingest local files for one-off analyses or testing a hypothesis before committing it to a permanent model.
- Connect directly to Google Sheets: Easily import data via Google Sheets either via Oauth or by specifying the Google Sheets URL and sharing the document.
- Merge queries (BigQuery): You can now combine your uploaded local files with standard, modeled Looker data, allowing you to enrich official company metrics with external data points to find new correlations. We’ve also added enhanced merge queries capabilities so you can perform merges on unlimited data as long as the data is on the same BigQuery connection.
- Re-upload and refresh: You can easily re-import or update files within existing self-service Explores to keep your ad-hoc dashboards current.
Exploration through conversation, with red-tape free governance
Business intelligence in the agentic era has created new opportunities for business and data leaders throughout your organization to engage with their information faster and more intuitively, without significant technical demand. Self-service Explores bring support for conversational analytics, enabling you to ask questions in natural language about your uploaded data and get immediate answers, outlined visually, with grounding in Looker’s semantic layer. Users can chat with their data to drill down deeper, gaining more insights with follow-up questions and refinement.
Additionally, self-service Explores are built with admin controls at the forefront. Admins have full visibility and monitoring capabilities, with clear distinctions between ad-hoc data and modeled data. This gives users the freedom to explore, while maintaining the integrity of your core business logic. Self-service Explores give you the agility of a spreadsheet with the scale and security of BigQuery. It’s about spending less time waiting for a data model and more time actually using your data. Get started today.