Looker Studio Visualisations pushed to Slack, Teams and Email

A few days ago I wanted to share a couple of charts and a table from a Looker Studio dashboard quickly with a client in Slack. I didn’t want to send a link to the whole dashboard, just put a couple of charts into slack to emphasise a point I was making.

I naievly thought there must be an option in Looker Studio to export and single chart, widget or table as an image. I could then just post that image into slack. However I was wrong, there is no such option. I googled around a bit and couldn’t find any quick and easy solution, so like a good experimental technologist I coded up a solution.

The approach I took was to load the looker studio into a headless version of the Chrome browser using puppeteer. I would then identify the DOM elements that corresponded to the charts and table I wanted and then do a ‘print screen’ function on them to render them as individual images.

Like any good engineer, rather than develop a specific solution to my immediate need I made it more general. What I ended up with is a webpage where you can enter the URL of any looker studio dashboard page, it will then automatically identify all the widgets (charts, tables, scorecards, etc) and it will generate an image of each and publish those images with unqiue URLs.

Once I had this up and running the next logical step was to integrate it directly with Slack via a slackbot. I can now connect the bot to slack, give the bot and Looker Studio Dashboard URL and it returns images of all the widgets on the page. You can then use slack automations to select whichever ones you want and post them regularly to a channel. This solution allows our teams and any clients to see core metrics and KPIs at a glance in slack without having to go out an view the dashboard.

If this is something that you would like to try for your organisation, do just get in touch.