MINHAZ KAZI: Welcome to "Data Vis Dev Talk."
I'm your host, Minhaz Kazi.
In this video series, we will talk
about Google's next-generation business intelligence
and dashboarding tool, Data Studio.
We will also show how you can build your own connector
to connect to any data source and then visualize that data.
Data Studio is a simple-to-use yet powerful reporting tool
that can be used for free.
It is completely web-based, so users can create and view
beautiful dashboards using their browser regardless of what
operating system they're on.
The dynamic and interactive nature of Data Studio
ensures that users are always getting the updated
information when visualizing and interactively exploring data.
Developers also get a lot of flexibility building solutions
around Data Studio since it works well
with other Google Cloud Platform and Google Marketing Platform
tools.
In this video, we will briefly talk
about how Data Studio works and who can benefit from it.
Let's get started.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Let's think of a few use cases for data visualization first.
Maybe you are a developer who have an existing
product or service and are looking to build a developer
solution on top of it.
You plan to make this solution available to all your users
in a cost-effective way.
Or maybe you're an analyst at an organization trying
to monitor internal KPIs like sales, or inventory data,
or have your own balance scorecard.
As an executive, you might need an easy to use
yet visually pleasing tool to talk about last quarter's
growth in an all-hands meeting.
Data storytelling helps people to understand insights
from a data set.
Journalists need tools to make the technical parts easy
and let them focus on the insights and storytelling
parts.
As a researcher, you might need a platform
to visually analyze your research data
and then publish the findings in an interactive blog.
Or maybe you are the owner of a unique data set
and would like to visualize and share
that data set with others.
In each of these use cases, it helps
to have a solution that is, one, scalable--
it works even if a large number of people are using it--
two, interactive-- it's not just a screenshot or static content.
Users should be able to tweak, adjust, change
settings and filters to derive their own conclusions--
three, cost-effective-- it should not break the bank
or take up massive amounts of time for developers to build
and maintain the solution--
and four, high-performing-- the solution
should work fast and respond quickly to user interactions
even with gigabytes of data.
Data Studio can help you to build solutions
with all four criteria.
Data Studio makes life easier for users,
enabling them to organize, access, and understand
their world of information.
So let's see how Data Studio works.
There are four steps to it--
connect, analyze, visualize, and share.
First, you connect your data in Data Studio.
Your data can be in different places.
Data Studio provides different connectors
to let you connect to your data.
We'll talk more about this connect step in our next video.
Next comes the analyze and visualize part.
I like to combine these two steps, since they
are highly related and depend on each other.
Data Studio provides different features for these two steps.
You can use Data Studio Explorer to visually explore the data.
Data Blending lets you blend data from multiple sources
into one single data source based
on a single field or a composite key.
You can always do manual calculations
and create custom fields using different functions.
When it comes to visualizations, Data Studio
comes with a number of built-in chart types,
including bar, column, line, time series, scatter,
et cetera.
You can also have data tables, pivot tables, and scorecards.
There are custom templates available in the report gallery
that can get you started quickly.
Also, if you have need for a specific type of visualization
and it is not available, you can develop your own visualization
using JavaScript libraries like D3.
Once you have built and started using your dashboard,
you can share it with others.
Sharing works using the Google Drive permissions.
You can provide view are edit access to certain people using
their emails or email groups.
You can always share using a link.
If you share edit access with others,
multiple people can work collaboratively
on the same dashboard, just like Google Docs.
You can take your dashboard link and embed it
in your website or blog post using IFrames or oEmbed.
Viewers of your site will be able to see the updated
data on the dashboard and interact it on your site.
You can also use your dashboard as a slide deck
when presenting insights and findings to an audience.
So that was an overview of how Data Studio works
and who can benefit from it.
In our next video, we'll talk about how
you can connect to your own data in Data Studio.
You can always go to our developer site
at developers.google.com/datastudio
for more information.
Thanks for watching.