3 Ways to add Annotations to Data Studio time series charts

At the time of the writing Data Studio doesn’t offer out of the box Annotations on time series charts. You can however add your annotations as seen below in easy ways.

Time series chart with two annotations applied

We will cover 3 ways how to add Data Studio Annotations:

• Adding by using a calculated field
• Using a CSV file and data source blending
• Using Google Sheets, some optional pivoting and data source blending

1. Add Annotation by using calculated field

To get going, Edit your data source (with the Pencil icon ), when you see your current fields, find and choose Add a field, name it after your event eg: Google Algorithm Update and add the below formula:

Section to add a calculated field to a datasource using a CASE formula

Timestamp is an existing field in our primary dataset. Please be aware that you might have a different field, or date format, and you need to experiment a bit with it. You might have 2019–09–30 or 20190930 so do retries until you get data on your screen.
Now you have your new field in the Available Fields to choose for your custom annotation.