Sharing in Data Studio is both easy and flexible.
You have a high degree of control over what viewers and editors of your reports can access.
In this video, we'll explore all of the various options you have for sharing reports.
The simplest sharing example is to make someone else a viewer of your report.
Let's share this simple report with our co-worker, Nick.
You can share a report in either view or edit mode.
If you don't see a share button, then you don't have rights to share that report.
If you're familiar with Google Drive, this sharing dialog will look very familiar.
That's because Data Studio is actually built on top of Drive.
We'll come back to that topic in the last section of this video.
To share a report with a specific person, just type in their name or email here.
You can enter as many people as you like.
Use the access options to control what other people can do with this report.
To make them viewers, change the access to "Can view"
As the name implies, viewers can only view the report.
They can interact with any controls you've added, such as this filter or date range control.
Viewers cannot change the report itself and they can't access the data source except through
the charts and controls in the report.
This means they only see the data you want them to see, in the way you want them to see it.
And, since it's a live Data Studio report, your viewers can come back whenever they want
to get the latest updates.
You can add a note to the sharing invitation, letting your audience know what to expect.
Once you send the invitation, your audience will get an email with a link to your report.
If your report will have a large audience, you might want to use Google Groups for the
recipient list.
Using Groups makes user management easier (and saves a lot of typing on your part).
To share the report even more broadly, use "link sharing."
This lets anyone with the link access your report.
For example, you might share the report link in a blog post or website.
Clicking "Get shareable link" both turns on link sharing and copies the link to your report
to the clipboard.
Note that anyone you share a report with must be signed in with a valid Google account to
access it, no matter how you shared it.
To let other people edit and collaborate on a report,
change the access control from "Can View" to "Can Edit."
Before you do that, be sure you understand what it means to be an editor.
When you share a report with someone and give them edit rights, they can modify the report
in every way.
They can add or delete charts and controls.
They can change the look and feel of the report by changing styles, and adding and removing pages.
Most importantly, editors have access to any of the fields in the data source.
They can use those fields to create or modify charts and controls.
And of course, they can see the data in those fields.
But, making someone a report editor doesn't mean they can change the data source itself.
"Can edit" only applies to the report.
Now, let's look at the Advanced sharing settings.
Use these settings if you want to give different access levels to different individual users
or groups.
For example, you can make "Nick" an editor, while everyone in the "Marketing" group can
just view the report.
This is also where you'd remove users and groups from the report.
By default, editors can share the report, but you can prevent them from doing so using
this option.
At the beginning of this video, we mentioned that Data Studio is built on Google Drive.
This means you can actually use Drive to organize your reports and data sources using Drive
folders.
For example, you could create a folder in Drive, and share that with your work team.
Then, locate any reports or data sources you want your team to have access to, and move
them to that folder.
Access to those components will then be subject to the folder's sharing settings.
Finally, the Drive API can be used to programmatically control and manage sharing options in Data Studio.
To learn more about sharing in Data Studio, visit the Help Center