Looker question

[farmazz666]

Hi everyone,
I have a question about Looker's capabilities—hopefully, this is the right place to ask! If not, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

I submitted this question through the Looker contact form about two weeks ago but haven’t received a reply yet, so I thought I’d try here.

Here’s the situation:
I already have a Looker report (prepared by someone else) that includes data like the number of hours worked on a project by each consultant, along with details like client name, consultant name, and project name.

What I’d like to do is add a way to highlight or flag when someone has worked overtime. For example, if someone exceeds 150 or 152 hours in a month (since working hours can vary each month due to holidays, etc.). Generally, we work 40 hours per week.

Is there a way—maybe a formula or calculated field—to show this in the report?

I’m not great with Excel or complex formulas; I’m just hoping to show overtime in the report and move on with my life. 😅

Thanks in advance for any help!

[sam8]

Welcome to Looker land! What you want to do is definitely possible, but could be varying levels of tricky depending on your familiarity with the tool. I'll do my best to keep this from getting too complicated. 

First - assuming you've been given view-only access to a Looker Studio report, there's no way to add annotations or highlights to a report as a viewer. So your first step would either be to get edit access to the report, or make your own copy of the report.

Now, assuming you can edit this report (or your personal copy), your ask has two steps as I see it:

1. Calculate the total number of hours per consultant per month.
2. Flag the consultants who exceed a certain number of hours per month.

For the first one, I think it would be easiest to change the format of the data rather than applying a calculated field on top of this data. I recommend creating a new chart on the report that includes only two fields - the consultant name and the number of hours. This will tell Looker Studio to aggregate the number of hours per consultant. I'm hoping that the prepared report already has a monthly filter set up - if that's the case, you'll now have a table showing the number of hours per consultant per month.

From here, you can apply conditional formatting to highlight the rows that exceed a given number! You could also sort the table by the number of hours (descending) so that the highest number of hours appears at the top.

I hope this helps! Happy to clarify anything, and sorry for sounding like an AI agent, this is just the way I write sometimes 🙃