Recently, I attended UMN Google Day and learned quite a few things! One thing I learned more about and got re-excited about was Google Data Studio.
Google Data Studio is a free, online tool that allows you to make data visualizations from many types of source data. I have found two types of source data to work particularly easily: Google Analytics data and Google Sheets data. You can also upload CSV, connect to external databases, etc.
I had tried Data Studio once before, and quickly became frustrated. That is because I was trying to place points on a Minnesota map by county. I'll just save you some frustration: it doesn't do county maps! But it does so many other handy things. Let's take a look.
First things first, you access Google Data Studio here: https://datastudio.google.com/
Begin by starting a new report. You can just mess around at first with whatever data you have handy! I played around with a Google Sheet where my team tracks project intake. Here is what it looked like when I set the Google Sheet up as a "Data Source" (which will be your first step). I did have to correct a few things, like making sure it saw date fields as dates.
Also note that this area is where you set the "Data credentials" of your report. If you leave the default "owner," then the report is using your credentials to access the data. You can change the data credentials setting to "Viewer," meaning that report users are required to supply their own credentials to see any data. I left it as default, but it is up to you.
After a couple hours (I got carried away because I love me a dashboard!!), I had a really nice report, able to be filtered by Center and date. You can try it for yourself here: https://datastudio.google.com/s/n1XMgMwqaSc
I had the gist of it in probably about 20 minutes, but then I had to fiddle with the colors and fonts and try to make it look nice. That part took forever. I should have just added maroon and gold and called it done.
In the past, I have set up a similar dashboard using MS Excel for reporting our computer budget spend, and it took me so much longer and involved gobs of pivoting. I can't wait to try putting that data into Data Studio and seeing if I can do it faster and better. I am so excited to play with this tool!
Our Web Team has been fiddling with Google Data Studio for analytics reports. Here is an example Web Analytics Dashboard that they are working on: https://datastudio.google.com/s/pNJySkc1ocI
Michael Donahue helped with the styling on that dashboard, so it looks really nice. And probably didn't take him two hours to do either! ha!
I am not an expert on Google Data Studio, but I thought it was fun enough to share! Be sure to comment if you have found a use for it so we can all learn more!
IT Goldy recommends:
Learn more about Google Data Studio:
https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/6283323?hl=enVideo tutorials:
https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/6390659
Comments
Post a Comment