Paint your Story

Storytelling is a form of art that has endured with time. Although its formats have undoubtedly changed, storytelling is still as important today as it was in historical addresses. Most industries nowadays are dominated by interactive visuals supported by data. To grow their businesses, people make data-driven decisions based on presentations that are supported by facts. It is therefore critical to have proficiency with data visualisation tools like Google Data Studio (GDS). Check out the attached blogs to learn the fundamentals of GDS and to understand which graph to use when. In this blog, I will present three GDS features which I find particularly useful.

#1 Chart Interactions

One of the key distinctions between dashboards and reports, is the fact that dashboards are interactive and enable clients to visually comprehend the data. As an example, consider designing a dashboard that shows humanitarian organisations that are contributing in different nations, although you only want to focus on one of these countries.

Chart Interactions will be your go-to friend in this case, as it allows you to filter all the charts from your dashboard based on your selection by enabling cross-filtering.

Now if you click on the country Philippines, all the charts will be filtered to display organisations which are active in this specific country.

#2 Page settings

All charts can be independently filtered, but what if you only want to present a subtopic on one page of your report? Keeping with the first dashboard, let’s say you want a specific page for the organisations working in the East African region. This is when the Current page settings in the main toolbar’s Page menu becomes relevant. Once this Current page settings has been chosen, you will be able to see the Setup and Style sections displayed on the right of the dashboard. From there, you simply need to choose the data source that you want to apply to the current page. Additionally, you can create a filter that can be used on all charts on the current page.

As an example, let’s create a page filter that only displays graphs showing activity in the East African region:

Once you save this filter, the dashboard will automatically filter all the charts to update itself as shown below.

If you wish to remove the filter for a particular chart, just disable the inherit filter option available in the setup section of that very chart.

#3 Schedule email delivery

The dynamics of the humanitarian sector are impacted by the daily generation of wide scale data. To understand what decision needs to be made next, it is crucial to keep track of your graph’s changing curve. To help with this, GDS offers the option to schedule email delivery of your reports in PDF format for regular updates.

This non-interactive PDF includes all your charts according to the most recent filter used. However, only the selected pages will be sent according to the time and period that you set. Scheduled emails can be edited or deleted as needed.

Google Data Studio’s user-friendly design makes it simple for beginners to get started. From connecting a data source to sharing your dashboard, GDS facilitates navigation making it a worthwhile tool for day-to-day use. The features described above are a handful that will undoubtedly improve your dashboards.

So get going — now is the moment for you to tell your story!