Looker has added a new tool into product which we can now use in Analytics: a Forecast tool that draws upon your data, and allows you to chart trends into the future.

Accessing Forecast

To find the "Forecast" tool, navigate to your report visualization above your data:

Once opened, you will see the "Forecast" tool to the right-hand side of the visualization bar:

This is where we can access the Forecast tools.

Using Forecast: Preparing data

Forecasting requires date based data, so to use it, let's begin with a Recent Sales report:

In order to get a good sample, I'm going to change the filters from the past 1 week...

to the past 12, so that when we run:

...we get lots of data to play with.

We also need to make sure that we are sorting descending by date:

So our data is ready now for forecasting.

Building a Forecast

So let's open up the Forecast tool:

We'll start by choosing the measures to forecast on:

I'll choose "Total", and that will add it to the selected fields:

Next we'll choose how far into the future we want to forecast for:

I have entered 30 days

Next, we can optionally include a prediction interval, accounting for a certain degree of expected variance within a forecast.

I'm going to enable it, and then select an interval of 95%

And then we can also account for Seasonality, taking the time of year into consideration in the forecast

When we have set the parameters the way we wish, we will "Run" the report again

...then based on the data in ourtable. we will see a broken line forecast into the future. We can also see here the Prediction interval working in the range around the broken line:

Forecast Data

With the Forecast tool projecting activity, the numbers for the forecast will be added to the Results of your data in italicized numbers with a suffix of a star.

We can still access the forecast using calculations, so if we want to create a running 7 day average of our sales/and/or/forecast, we can: