Sharing Privately Dashboard without google account

Looker Q&A Looker Studio
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Good morning dear members of the Lookerstudio community. I would like to know some options to privately share a dashboard with clients who cannot use their personal Google accounts on their desktops.
I have been thinking about the possibility of proxying the dashboards from my public site using MFA, but I don’t know if it is possible. I would appreciate your support.

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My response from a previous thread on this topic:

One workaround for this would be to set up the dashboard to use a password. It would be shared as Public, but no data would appear unless the password was correct. Here’s a simple way to set this up:

  • Create a parameter called Enter your password
  • Create a calculated field called Include that looks like this: IF(Enter your password = “MyPassword”, 1, 0)
  • Set a report level filter to only include records where Include = 1
  • Add an Input Box control that allows the user to enter a value for the Enter your password parameter.
  • If the user doesn’t enter the correct password, all Include records are set to 0 and therefore no data appears in the report.

You can even take this up a notch by having different passwords that allow for different levels of access. You can see an example here.

This approach is not as secure as “filter by email” and Restricted sharing, but it’s a workaround when your users don’t have Google accounts (required by both of those approaches)

1 Like
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Thanks Laura.

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@lauratilton : Would this work if I’m a Google Workspace user and I want to share a report outside my workspace domain to Non google users? What are the workarounds in that case?

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Hi Laura, and many thanks for this.

Can you help as I am struggling. I have a simple use case I think but am missing something (probably a brain cell).

I need to create a single login for each company which is itemised in one column, this is so that I can deliver a login for each company and filter their results to view only from a public link.

This mechanism seems to fit the bill since the companies are all included in the main file

CASE

WHEN Enter your password = “MyPassword” THEN 1 (Anyone with this password will see everything)

WHEN Company = “XYX” and Enter your password = “Green” THEN 1 (Anyone with this password will see only XYZ company)

WHEN Company = “ABC” and Enter your password = “Pineapple” THEN 1 (Anyone with this password will see only ABC company)

ELSE 0

END

But I am confused as I cannot set a report level filter = 1 (it will only accept 0)

Should I be adding a password file/dataset?

If so, where are the Parameters & calculated fields set - on the main data source or the password?

Any help/explanation is welcome.

Thanks

Tony J

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Hi Tony, in my example above I’ve hard-coded the permissions into the CASE statement. But you could also set up a corresponding Google Sheet that would contain Company Name and Password. Then, set this up as a data source, and add the Enter your password Parameter to it, along with the Include calculated field, and create the report-level filter as described above.

Then, set up a blend with your password sheet on the left, with the Include filter on it, and left join your main data source on Company Name. I put together an example here. (The passwords are ABC or XYZ)

As I was setting this up, I ran into the same issue you did where you couldn’t create the Include filter = 1. This seems to be happening because there is no 1 in the data source by default. My suggestion would be to create a default password (“Password”) and add an entry into your data sources to go with it, so there’s something displayed when first accessing the dashboard.

Let me know if that helps!