Data Visualization is a very important part of the analysis and for the business decision-makers to understand complex datasets. There are so many data visualization tools such as Tableau, Plotly, Qlikview, FusionCharts, etc. Google Data Studio is a free online data visualization tool. There are various demo and templates that can be used and make your work earlier.
Here are two steps to creating your own dashboard that can be shared online.
Step 1- Load the data to Google Data Studio (GDS)
After you log in to GDS, you can see the picture as following image below —
We can either open a new blank report or click one template next to it. After we click “Blank Report”, we can see a new page like this-
This is super easy to connect the data with your GDS dashboard. If you are working with Google Analytics and want to show some insights and want to customize it. Then you can connect Google Analytics with GDS. Google Analytics itself also provides excellent data visualization functions, but if you want to report it to some people who do not understand datasets well then you can use GDS to presents some actionable insights.
If you are familiar with Google Cloud Platform, you can also connect your data from BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, MySQL, etc. There are also a lot of Partner Connectors that can be connected with GDS.
If you want to create a real-time dashboard and connect with your google sheet, you can simply import datasets and save it to your google drive then you can connect the datasets to GDS. Then you can simply update the datasets in google sheet and the GDS dashboard can update accordingly.
If you have datasets locally on your laptop, you can simply upload your file by clicking “File Upload” —
Step 2 - Add charts to your dashboard
After we load the data, we can see a table that GDS auto-generated. We can simply click “Add a chart” and choose different proper graphs that we need.
Honestly speaking, GDS and Tableau have so many similarities. If you have some foundations in Tableau, you can learn GDS easily.
One more tip for you — you can manipulate data for a chart. For example, you want to create a map with the data of latitude and longitude. You can click the location bar to add dimension, then you can see “+ CREATE FIELD”. After you click it, a small window will show up. You can enter the name and use the formula to concatenate latitude and longitude. Next, you can select the type below “Geo” and select the latitude and longitude option. Here you go! You got a map!
