Hands On With Google Data Studio

A Data Citizen's Survival Guide

Lee Hurst

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119616214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Visualisation
• Index: Computer Science

Learn how to easily transform your data into engaging, interactive visual reports!

Data is no longer the sole domain of tech professionals and scientists. Whether in our personal, business, or community lives, data is rapidly increasing in both importance and sheer volume. The ability to visualize all kinds of data is now within reach for anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Google Data Studio, quickly becoming the most popular free tool in data visualization, offers users a flexible, powerful way to transform private and public data into interactive knowledge that can be easily shared and understood. Hands On With Google Data Studio teaches you how to visualize your data today and produce professional quality results quickly and easily.

No previous experience is required to get started right away—all you need is this guide, a Gmail account, and a little curiosity to access and visualize data just like large businesses and organizations. Clear, step-by-step instructions help you identify business trends, turn budget data into a report, assess how your websites or business listings are performing, analyze public data, and much more. Practical examples and expert tips are found throughout the text to help you fully understand and apply your new knowledge to a wide array of real-world scenarios. This engaging, reader-friendly guide will enable you to:

• Use Google Data Studio to access various types of data, from your own personal data to public sources
• Build your first data set, navigate the Data Studio interface, customize reports, and share your work
• Learn the fundamentals of data visualization, personal data accessibility, and open data API's
• Harness the power of publicly accessible data services including Google's recently released Data Set Search
• Add banners, logos, custom graphics, and color palettes

Hands On With Google Data Studio: A Data Citizens Survival Guide is a must-have resource for anyone starting their data visualization journey, from individuals, consultants, and small business owners to large business and organization managers and leaders.

Part I
Data Studio Basics

In This Part

• Chapter 1: Data Studio and the Data Citizen
• Chapter 2: Cooking with Google Data Studio
• Chapter 3: Enhancing Basic Graphs
• Chapter 4: Data Exploration with Interactive Elements

CHAPTER 1
Data Studio and the Data Citizen

Since you are reading this book, you probably qualify as a “data citizen.” What do I mean by that term? A data citizen is someone who

• Has access to data in a format that can be analyzed
• Has access to the tools for data analysis
• Has a personal, business, or community interest in building their data literacy and skills
• Has some interest in deriving value from data to benefit themselves personally, their business, or their community

I'm not the first person to use the phrase “data citizen,” but I found that most definitions of the term seemed too restrictive, too bound only to the interests of those working in corporate enterprises, describing their relationships to those organizations. I believe that we need to expand the concept so that it is more inclusive and focused on the individual, regardless of their business relationships.

For our purposes, being a data citizen is a recognition of your current state of meeting the criteria from the list. There is no “Data People's Republic” to enforce the rights and responsibilities of a data citizen. The only state to which you as a data citizen belong is a state of mind. It is the acknowledgment that you have the right to analyze and interpret data yourself and that you recognize the need to act responsibly with the interpretations and guidance that you provide to others.

This book is geared to those people who are ready to explore the opportunities and possibilities that come with being a data citizen. To support your growth in this area, I will be focusing on using Google Data Studio as a primary tool in your explorations. Before we get into the details, however, let's take a brief look at the factors that are creating the rise of the data citizen.

Data, Data Everywhere

You can't participate as a data citizen without data! Fortunately, we have an abundance of that resource. Data, in all its many varied forms, continues to grow at mind‐boggling rates. It is currently estimated that 1.7 megabytes of data are being created for every person on Earth, every second of every day. To give that number some context, it is like every person on Earth uploading about 50 full‐length movies each and every day!

Data is being generated from a large variety of sources today. Not that long ago, most information was collected by actual people. Manual data entry is still a vital part of the data collection landscape. (You're doing it whenever you fill in an online form.) The manual input of data has been augmented by data generated from software operating in virtually every aspect of business, from manufacturing to marketing.

New torrents of data are now being added by the multitude of devices that are creating measurements and logging that data, from satellites to your personal fitness tracker. In addition, we have a flood of user‐generated content, from uploaded videos to Facebook posts to email to tweets. All of this digital content can be treated as data in some form or another.

In addition to the original data that we generate, there is also metadata, which is data generated about the data itself. Programs that help us classify and summarize data produce even more data!

Accessibility of Data

Another prerequisite for exercising your data citizenship is access to data. Although access to public community data, and even data generated for us at a personal level, has lagged a bit behind compared to the amount of data collected, we have more access to data than ever before.

At a personal level, we have the ability to access data generated for us from most online services—anywhere from personal banking to online music services. As concern for privacy and collection of data on our personal habits has grown, so too has some access to data generated about us.

At the community level, we also have more access to data collected by our governments and agencies. Recent trends have been for increased public access to data in an effort to make governments and organizations more transparent. Access to this public information benefits businesses, as it gives them information that they could not afford to gather on their own.

From individual hobbyists running their own websites, to the small business and local organizations, to the largest corporations and government entities, all levels of individuals and organizations have the ability to generate data for their online properties, and all have the ability to access and analyze that data.

Deriving Value from Data

Whether or not you pursue data citizenship for your own personal or community interests, you are likely to participate in the objective of getting value from data in your business life. Working with data was once mainly the responsibility of the business analy...