Google Data Studio

I love Google Data Studio... it's quite hard to select one feature, cause all the program is great, from the easy to use tables, the charts tables, graphics, the custimizable layout, the connection with your database...

Sometimes it gets a little bit slow and the tables or charts bugs... but it's understandable

To have a tool that give to you the opportunity to develop a complete dashboard is amazing, and the fact that that tool is free, is awesome.
I really enjoy that GDS is really easy to use, I learn by myself and seeking videos on the internet. It is a very intuitive application, so you might not know anything about data visualization and you could still use it without problem.
I really like that the Google apps have very similar edit pages, so if you have ever used Google Forms, you are going to find GDS very familiar.

I find this software very useful, but there is one thing that I want they to improve, if there is the possibility. The connection with Microsoft Office, for example: Microsoft Excel. If you want to make a dashboard on GDS, you have to pass your data to google sheets, and you lost a lot of features that Excel gives to you. There is a way to do it by using python, but, if you want to preserve the fact that this software is really easy to use, so, it is not a solution to this problem.

It seems that every third party SaaS that collects data online has native synchronization support for Google sheets. And this is how Google Data Studio makes itself the best option for non profits and small businesses in need of automated business intelligence.

On top of the plug'n'play integration experience, data studio has a unique approach to interactive chart and dashboard design that lets you position elements as if you were working in Adobe Photoshop. You can add shapes, layer elements on top of each other, add text or objects anywhere. This means you can produce the most beautiful and intuitive dashboards and reports ever (or the least if you're more of a Picasso).

It really is the poor man's business intelligence automation tool. Some key setbacks for data scientists is that data studio can only do 1 type of join/blend (outter left) and when using blended data to create calculated fields it really feel more like art than science, and not always working out. There is also no way to create unions across all data sources or make a file directory a data source.

All this means that you really need to do a lot of data prep in Google sheets and find a way to do some automatic data blending in Google sheets as well in some cases. This will keep the complexity of your needs in Data Studio minimal, which seems to work best.

This software can link up with your Google Analytics account and retrieve data from there. So instead of using the slopping reporting function inside Google Analytics, you can make use of the power offered by Google Data Studio.

It can make simple, but sophisticated table-based data using columns (or calculated columns), to present your data in many ways.

OR, you can choose to use one of the many types of graphics / charts offered in this software.

Last but not least, there are tons of community and native reporting templates, you can simply just download and start using.

I used to pay Megalytics for really crappy and limited reports. By migrating my deployments over to Google Data Studio, things are free, and does more than ever before.

Delivering website / web application reports to my clients is no longer a luxurious thing.

User identifyiable information cannot be reported when linking up with Google Analytics. This includes things like email address.

Extremely user friendly. Setting up the dashboards was simple. You have control over almost every detail, including the layout and design. This is unlike many data platforms I've used in the past. ALMOST everything is totally customizable. This brings in all your Google/Youtube data automatically (including Google Sheets/docs). It also lets your bring in images, links, and other assets. You can change the data range filter easily for all metrics. The dashboard also is easily shareable to all team members and you can export the dashboard to a PDF.

The connectivity to other platforms is disappointing. In order to automatically bring in your social media data or data from other sources (such as digital advertising or 1st party ecommerce data) you need to purchase a "connector". However, there are ways around this if you export your data from your other sources and just put this in a Google Sheet and connect that sheet to your Google Data Studio.