Looker not recognizing my data fields

[mica_oli]

I have to create a report for inscriptions to a program we have in our site, related to veterinary students. The report that comes up from the program when I download it is simply an excel sheet with fields like the name of the user, contact info (mail), when they signed up for the program (a date field), which university they belong to, what year they're on in their major (1st year, 2nd year and so and so), as well as some additional fields for points (users can do different courses and things to earn points in 3 different categories and receive prizes based on that, so we have an aggregation of points too).

Now, I started my Looker report and managed to add several things (like distribution among universities, by year of major, total inscriptions to the program, total points earned and even a point ranking) but I want to be able to filter some of the data by the date of sign up.

When I add a date range filter (to see for example the amount of registrations between certain dates) it doesn't work. All the other elements turn to 0 or no data (when I know for a fact that there are).

I want to add other graphs (like amount of points per year of major and per area) with no luck, but I don't want to mix things up. I'd like to solve the date thing first because that was something the client specifically asked.

I have a feeling that Looker doesn't work well with my data for whatever reason, and it's driving me insane. Would love to have some guidance as to where to look and what to try!

[阿泰 · Accepted solution]

Hi, if Looker Studio doesn’t display any data or shows an error message when you update the date option, it means the date format is incorrect.

The simplest solution is to convert all dates into this format: "250324", "250321" and select the data type as "Date" in Looker Studio.

[mica_oli]

Thanks! I'll try that. I had read in other threads about different format options and apparently mine was correct but I guess it wasn't. I imagine the format you put is YYMMDD (with no dashes or anything ofc).

[mica_oli]

Hi!!

Just wanted to let you know that changing the whole column data to that format worked like a charm. I simply grabbed the whole column, changed the format to custom date and time, deleted the dashes between the date values, reordered them and voila! 

(I also managed to do the other chart I mentioned in the original post; still working on understanding what each parameter in the settings mean, but I'm getting there).

Thanks!

[阿泰]

Yes, with on dashes or anything just number. Also could you show some screenshot of your date or raw data for us? Thanks!

[mica_oli]

Yes sure! Covered the names just to be safe but all data looks like this (there's a few more columns after "total" but i'm not really using them atm, it's mostly these columns.

[阿泰]

Hi! Thanks. Have you tried importing column D into Looker Studio? By the way, what is the data type of column D? Is it a String or a Date? You can create a new date column in Excel and use it in Looker Studio. Also, please ensure the data type is correct in Looker Studio.