Data Studio – A “Hello, World!” Guide

Posted byc.c.butterfly178

Data Studio is a free data visualisation tool provided by Google since 2016. Tableau also provides a public version for you to use for free. Until now, I think the major difference between them is Data Studio is online you don’t need to install anything on your desktop or laptop and it can integrate with the data source in your google drive in real-time.

In this post, I’ll use a simple case to demo how to use data studio. The steps are quite simple. First, download data. Second, upload data. Then, clean the data. Finally, create a chart.

Download Data

We’ll use a historical stock, 0050, price from Taiwan in 2021 This is a famous ETF here. We can download the data from here. https://www.twse.com.tw/zh/page/trading/exchange/FMSRFK.html

Upload the data

We can upload the data to Google drive or to Data Studio directly. I suggest uploading it to google drive which can be accessed by the others. Open your google drive and drop the downloaded CSV to the page directly.

Clean the Data

Open the CSV with google sheet to check whether the data is tidy.

Delete not necessary data in the sheet. The table should looks like below

Create the Chart

It may not easy to find the data studio in the google apps list on the browser. But it’s okay, just type it in the search bar.

Then you will see the main page.

  1. The sidebar you can create a new report and check the report related to you
  2. Search the report by name. So it’s better to name each report with a rational name
  3. Template report you can use
  4. To see all template reports or create a new report
  5. The report list of yours

Let’s create a blank report. Then Data Studio requires you to upload data. Then choose google sheet to add the stock data.

Then the raw data table shows in the report. Let’s delete it first.

Now, assume we want to know the stock price changes by month. So, let’s create a line chart.

Change the dimension and metric.

Make the chart looks better by style pane.

Result

Congratulations! Now, you can use Data Studio to create any impressive chart for the others. Good luck on the journey!

Reference: Kemp, Grant, and Gerry White. Google Data Studio for Beginners : Start Making Your Data Actionable / Grant Kemp, Gerry White. 1st ed. 2021. New York, New York: Apress L. P., 2021. Web.