How Do You Add Bullet Points in Looker Studio?

You have a Looker Studio report that needs a short list. Three takeaways above a chart, four caveats under a table, a handful of definitions in a sidebar. So you drop in a text box, start typing, and go looking for the bullet list button.

There isn't one.

This is one of those small gaps that costs people twenty minutes of hunting through panels before they conclude the feature must be hidden somewhere. It isn't hidden. Looker Studio's text element simply does not have list formatting, and the fix is a workaround rather than a setting. The good news is that the workaround takes about fifteen seconds once you know it, and it produces lists that look identical to native ones.

What follows is the method, the three alternatives worth knowing when the method is not quite enough, and an honest look at when a bulleted list is the wrong element for a dashboard in the first place.

So can you add bullet points in Looker Studio?

Yes, but not with a list control, because Looker Studio does not have one. You add bullet points by typing or pasting the bullet character itself at the start of each line inside a normal text box.

Google's own documentation for report text is explicit about what the element can do. It says to "Use the Text Properties options to change the font, size, color, padding, and other aspects of the text." Font, size, color, padding. Lists are not mentioned anywhere in that documentation, and no amount of searching the Style panel will surface them, because the control does not exist.

So the bullet is a character, not a format. You put a • in front of each line, press Enter between lines, and let the text box render it. Looker Studio treats that character like any other glyph, which means it inherits your font, your size and your color automatically, and it will never break when the report is shared or exported.

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The result is indistinguishable from a real bulleted list to anyone reading the dashboard. The only thing you lose is automatic hanging indentation on wrapped lines, which matters for long items and not at all for short ones.

It is also stable in a way that formatting is not. Because the bullet is part of the string rather than a property of the element, nothing about it can be lost when a report is duplicated, embedded in a page, or scheduled as a PDF to a stakeholder's inbox. Character-based bullets are the least fragile thing on the canvas.

Why there is no bullet button

It helps to understand what the text element is for, because then the gap stops feeling like an oversight.

The text box is a label, not a document

Looker Studio's canvas is a layout surface for data components. Text boxes exist to title sections, annotate charts and hold short explanatory notes. They were never built as a rich text editor, which is why the properties panel covers typography and spacing and stops there. Google's documentation describes adding one in three steps: click the Text icon in the toolbar, size the box on the canvas, and "Click inside the text box to add your text in the box." That is the whole feature.

The same philosophy shows up elsewhere in the element set. Shapes exist, per Google's docs, to "create visual separation of data elements, banners, and other graphical effects" — visual scaffolding, not content structure. Images support PNG, JPG and SVG with an aspect-ratio toggle, a link URL and alt text. Everything in the toolbar is a thin presentation primitive.

Looker and Looker Studio are not the same product

This is where a lot of confusion comes from, and it is worth getting straight because the answer genuinely differs between the two.

Looker — the enterprise BI platform — has Markdown tiles on user-defined dashboards, and those do support lists. Google's documentation confirms that "Unordered lists can use asterisks, or minuses, or pluses," with `*`, `-` and `+` all valid markers. If you have ever seen someone write Markdown bullets into a Google BI tool and have it render properly, that was Looker, not Looker Studio.

Looker also distinguishes its tile types. Its docs note that "Text tiles are a new type of Looker text tile that do not use Markdown but instead provide a visual editing experience," which means even within Looker you need the right tile to get Markdown behaviour.

Looker Studio has no equivalent. Pasting `- item` into a Looker Studio text box renders a literal hyphen followed by a space. That is not a bug and it will not be fixed by changing a setting.

How to add bullet points in Looker Studio, step by step

Here is the actual procedure. It works in both edit and view mode and survives sharing, scheduling and PDF export.

1. In the toolbar, click the Text icon to add a text box to the canvas.
2. Drag the box to roughly the width you want. Width matters more than height here, because it controls where your lines wrap.
3. Click inside the box to place your cursor.
4. Insert a bullet character. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0149 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac, press Option and 8. If neither is convenient, copy a • from anywhere — this article, a Google Doc, a character picker — and paste it.
5. Type a space, then your first list item.
6. Press Enter and repeat for each item. Paste the bullet again at the start of each line.
7. Open the Style tab and set font, size and color under Text Properties as you would for any other text.

A faster version for lists you already have: write the list in Google Docs or any editor that does have bullet formatting, then copy and paste it into the Looker Studio text box. The bullet glyphs come across as characters even though the formatting does not, which is exactly what you want.

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For indentation, use leading spaces or a second bullet character such as ◦ for sub-items. Looker Studio preserves the spaces you type, so a two-level list is achievable, just manual.

One habit worth adopting: build the list in a plain text editor first, get the wording tight, then paste the whole block in at once. Editing multi-line text inside a small canvas box is fiddly, and you will make better cuts to the copy when you are looking at it as text rather than as a layout element.

Which character to use

The standard round bullet • is the safest choice and reads as a bullet to everyone. A few alternatives are worth knowing:

• – (en dash) looks cleaner at small sizes and in dense sidebars
• ▪ (small square) suits reports with a more angular visual style
• ◦ (white bullet) works well as a second-level marker under •
• ✓ (check mark) is useful for lists of things that are done or included

Avoid emoji. They render inconsistently across platforms and will look wrong in an exported PDF.

Three other ways to get list formatting

The character trick covers most cases, but not all. If your list needs to behave like a component rather than a label, consider these.

One text box per item. Instead of one box with four lines, use four boxes stacked with equal spacing. This is more work up front, but it gives you pixel control over vertical rhythm, lets you color individual items differently, and lets you align each line to a chart element beside it. It is the right call for a scorecard-style column of highlights.

Shapes as bullet marks. Drop a small circle or square shape to the left of each text line and use the text box purely for the words. Because shapes have their own fill and border controls, you can match bullets to a brand palette or to series colors in the chart above. This produces the most polished result and takes the longest.

An image of the list. For a list that never changes and must look exactly right — a legend, a methodology note, a disclaimer block — build it in a design tool and insert it as an SVG. Looker Studio supports SVG and has an alt-text field, so accessibility is preserved. The cost is that editing means re-exporting the file.

A fourth option exists for the specific case of lists that come from your data: a table chart with a single dimension and no metrics renders as a clean column of values, and it updates itself. It will not have bullet glyphs, but if your "list" is really the top five campaigns or the current set of tracked keywords, a one-column table is the correct element and the question of bullets disappears.

When a bulleted list is the wrong choice

Worth asking before you build it, because a dashboard is not a document and lists are often a symptom of text that belongs somewhere else.

If every item is a number, you want scorecards, not bullets. Four scorecards in a row communicate four metrics faster than four bulleted lines, and they update themselves. A bulleted list of figures is a static snapshot that will be wrong by next week and nobody will notice.

If the list is explaining how to read a chart, consider whether the chart can be fixed instead. Clearer axis labels, a better title or a reference line usually beat a note telling people what they are looking at.

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If the list runs past five or six items, it probably belongs in a linked document rather than on the canvas. Dashboard real estate is expensive and scrolling text boxes — Looker Studio does offer a Hidden option in the Scroll text menu under Overflow — are a sign the content has outgrown its container.

Bullets earn their place when they hold a small number of qualitative points that a reader needs while looking at the data: caveats, definitions, next steps, known gaps in the dataset.

Limitations worth knowing before you build

A few things will bite you if you do not expect them.

No hanging indent. When a long item wraps, the second line starts flush with the bullet rather than aligned under the first word. On short items this is invisible. On items longer than a line it looks noticeably unfinished, and the only fixes are shortening the text, widening the box, or switching to one-box-per-item.

No automatic renumbering. If you build a numbered list by typing the digits, reordering means retyping every number. This is the single most common cause of dashboards that read 1, 2, 4, 5.

Find and replace does not exist. There is no way to swap every • for a – across a report in one action. Decide on your bullet character before you build twelve text boxes.

Theme changes do not know about your bullets. Because the bullet is a character inside the text, a global font change will resize it with everything else — which is good — but a change in list style is not a concept Looker Studio has, so there is nothing to inherit.

Copy behaviour varies. Readers who select and copy text from a view-mode report get the bullet characters along with the words. That is usually fine and occasionally untidy when the text lands in a spreadsheet cell.

Screen readers see a paragraph. Because there is no list markup underneath, assistive technology reads the block as continuous text with bullet characters in it rather than announcing it as a list of four items. For a short set of notes this is a minor degradation; for anything load-bearing it is an argument for putting the content in an accessible document and linking to it.

How this compares to other reporting tools

Context helps when you are deciding whether this is worth fighting.

Looker Studio is the most restrictive of the common options, and deliberately so. It is free, browser-based and built for speed of assembly. Rich text was traded away for simplicity.

Looker, as covered above, supports Markdown lists in Markdown tiles. Power BI's text box offers bullets through its own formatting controls. Tableau's text objects support bulleted lists in the text editor. Google Slides and Docs, which people often use for the final presentation layer anyway, have full list formatting.

The practical read: if the report is a dashboard people check, build the bullets as characters and move on. If the report is a deliverable people read once in a meeting, consider whether the narrative belongs in Slides with the Looker Studio charts embedded or screenshotted alongside.

It is also worth not over-weighting this limitation when you choose a tool. Text formatting is close to the least important thing a reporting platform does. Looker Studio's connector coverage, its sharing model and its price are the reasons people pick it, and none of those change because you have to paste a bullet character.

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Final Thoughts

Looker Studio does not have bullet point formatting, and it is not going to find it for you in a submenu. Google's documentation is clear that the text element controls font, size, color and padding — typography, not structure. The bullet you want is a character, and typing or pasting it at the start of each line gets you a list that looks native, inherits your styling and never breaks.

Reach for one text box per item when spacing needs to be exact, shapes when the bullets should match your palette, and an SVG when the block must be pixel-perfect and never changes. And before you build any of it, check that the list is not four numbers in disguise, because those want to be scorecards.

If the Looker and Looker Studio distinction in this article was news to you, it is worth understanding properly — the two products share a name, a Google badge and almost nothing else. Our breakdown of Looker Studio vs Looker covers which one you are actually using and what each is built for.