Note: Google Data Studio is now known as Looker Studio.

When you create or edit a data source schema in Looker Studio, you get the option to select the data type of the data source schema field. 

One of the data types supported by Looker Studio is: ‘Text’:

Select the ‘Text’ data type if you want Looker Studio to expect text when processing a field in the underlying data source.

A text data type can include any combination of letters, numbers, special symbols (like [, }, @….) and other characters.

Consider the following Google Sheets data source:

Here all the values of the field ‘Customers Name’ are of type ‘Text’.

So when defining the data source schema, we would set the data type of the field ‘Customers Name’ to ‘Text’:

A number formatted as ‘plain text’ in your data source is considered as of type ‘text’ by Looker Studio.

You would know a number has been formatted as ‘plain text’ in a data source if it is aligned to the left (instead of the right). 

For example:

These seemingly trivial mistakes can make a huge difference in your reporting. 

That’s why it is so important that you format your data correctly before you use it in Looker Studio. 

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