
Google Data Studio in 10 Minutes: Step-By-Step Guide - viktoriia_sh
https://datascience-school.com/blog/google-data-studio-in-10-minutes-step-by-step-guide/
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soared
Data Studio fills a weird niche. At my previous job I built a report in it and
sent it to a client (approved by my manager). The client was ecstatic. They
loved the report, how easy it was to understand, pretty design, etc. When this
feedback got back to our CTO he was furious because no one else on my team was
technical enough to use data studio, so I effectively delivered a product only
I could produce. All our reports were typically made in microsoft word with
screenshots of graphs from excel.

Data studio is a little too technical for most people, but not technical
enough for another large group of people. It like photoshop + pivot tables. It
works incredibly well for a small set of people who are semi-technical,
already know how to analyze data, and have some graphic design senses. I
expect google to kill it eventually, or integrate it into analytics/google
ads/dbm/etc and kill the spreadsheet integration.

~~~
oavdeev
That set of people is not that small; it is basically what people in business
analyst roles do all day. They know Excel very well and maybe even a bit of
python/js, have a good understanding of the business problem at hand, but not
technical enough to do full on custom reports from scratch.

Data Studio fits squarely in this market of tools for them, and that space is
growing and pretty crowded. There a multiple big businesses built on producing
tools just like that, for example Tableau (public company valued at ~10B as of
today).

Granted, Data Studio is more basic but it is free and nicely integrates with
the rest of Google data product suite (Analytics, Sheets, BigQuery). I don't
think it will go away, and I think it is actually the strongest part of google
cloud offering (and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup).

~~~
cosmie
> and the biggest gap in AWS cloud product lineup

AWS has a similar product, QuickSight[1]. It's not my favorite to use, but
integrates with the AWS ecosystem as easily as Data Studio integrates with the
Google ecosystem.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/)

~~~
oavdeev
Yeah QuickSight is their shot at that market. But (anecdotally) I don't think
it getting much traction. The fact that they didn't have any flashy
announcements about it at re:Invent this year somewhat corroborates that.
There is something in Amazon DNA that prevents them from building great UX-
centric products.

Besides, without something like Google Sheets or Excel it is not that useful,
inevitably you have a ton of small data across the org that is stored in
spreadsheets.

One obvious play for Amazon is to just pay a ton of cash and acquire something
like Airtable, but they don't seem to be for sale.

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un-devmox
Unrelated, but I hate this growing trend of anonymous service/information
providers. If I'm going to give my personal information to an organization and
trust its content and potentially pay for a service, I want to know who you
are.

So, who is datascience-school besides a location in Singapore? Who are the
founders, who else is involved, what are their stories/history and
motivations. All of this would lend some credibility to any organization.

~~~
hiccuphippo
In this case you are not giving your data to datascience-school but to Google.

So I'd like to see Google's stories/history and motivations.

~~~
un-devmox
My comment has nothing to do with the post/tutorial, but rather datascience-
school in general.

~~~
paulcole
I guess you missed their thorough About Us section.

> Data Science School offers online data science and engineering courses with
> practical assignments.

If Data Science School is going to give their personal information to someone
and potentially take their money, Data Science School wants to know who they
are.

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philip1209
We currently use Metabase - can anybody speak to the differences between
Metabase and Google Data Studio?

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soared
I've never used metabase but I've used data studio quite a bit. From what I
can tell metabase provides hard analysis tools and a ton of other features
(sql, embedding, asking questions) while ds is mostly just a dashboard and
reporting tool.

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samfisher83
I tried to connect to a dataset and I get this error:

Data Set Configuration Error

Data Studio cannot connect to your data set.

Failed to fetch data from the underlying data set

I wish the error messages would be a little more helpful.

~~~
joeyoung
You may need to have billing enabled on your project.

~~~
samfisher83
I have a CC with google for their other cloud stuff. Is there a separate one
for this?

~~~
joeyoung
Not knowing the specifics of your situation, I’m making a lot of assumptions
here. In the steps for this guide it instructs the user to select a Billing
Project when connecting to the data source (I’m assuming a BigQuery dataset).
Billing needs to be “enabled” on this project that’s selected as the “Billing
Project”.

Here’s a link to steps where you can confirm whether billing is enabled for
this project and enable it if needed.

[https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/modify-
project#...](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/modify-
project#enable_billing_for_an_existing_project)

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somada141
It's funny how the article calls Data Studio 'new'. It's been around for
years. When I first found out about it in a Google training workshop I put
together a quick report based on our massive BigQuery datasets and my boss was
over the moon and so were the clients we sent reports to. I'd say its a lovely
tool that competes against Tableau. Hopefully it'll survive :).

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encyclopedia
This is great! Does anyone have interesting datasets besides the examples
pointed to?

~~~
soared
Last time I used data studio all the public data sets in google big query were
available in data studio (hn comments, reddit comments, nyc taxis, etc)

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KasianFranks
Datasets [https://medium.com/@492727ZED/datasets-with-context-
control-...](https://medium.com/@492727ZED/datasets-with-context-
control-e867d600b0)

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bshell
At our workplace we API our internal commisions software to Google Data studio
and we can see our teams performance in real time as it relates to payroll.

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krembo
This is one of the products I bet will go to Google's graveyard soon

