New Looker Studio (formerly called Google Data Studio) feature: Report Theme in Navigation

How to change the theme of the report navigation. By Alexander Junke

3 min readJan 24, 2022

Looker Studio (formerly called Google Data Studio) released a new feature for the default report navigation on 9th December 2021. With this release, the default page navigation from Looker Studio gets aligned with the chosen report theme.

The navigation gets the theme colors when you choose one of the available navigation types Left, Tab, or Top Left. There is no navigation when you choose the Hidden type, so you have to implement your own navigation.

This post covers a new feature in Looker Studio, so everybody can take a look.

Predefined themes

When you choose one of the themes Looker Studio already offers, the navigation menu gets aligned on the main colors of the theme. An example would be the theme “Insight”:

So the background of the navigation is still white, like the report background. And the background of the chosen navigation level is dark grey, like the bars in the bar chart.

Also a kind of a dark-mode theme is possible (Theme: Constellation):

Custom themes

For the custom theme is a new section available “Page navigation style”.

With the text style you can choose the background color, font color and the style of the font (the auto value takes the font style from the primary styles section). The background color defines the colour of the whole navigation area. So with the upper settings you get the following navigation look:

Conclusion

This new feature is a little improvement for the look of your dashboard. Especially that you have the opportunity to choose different settings just for the navigation is a great customization. But I would still recommend building your own navigation inside your report because then you have more flexibility.

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Further Links

This post is part of the new features in the Google cloud series from datadice and gives you detailed insights about a new feature in BigQuery or Looker Studio.

If you want to learn more about how to use Google Looker Studio and take it to the next level in combination with BigQuery, check our Udemy course here.

We also started with our own YouTube channel. We talk about important DWH, BigQuery, Looker Studio and many more topics. Check out the channel here.

If you are looking for help to set up a modern and cost-efficient data warehouse or analytical dashboards, send us an email to hello@datadice.io and we will schedule a call.