Look Out! It's Looker Studio! What does this mean for K-12 users?

Yesterday at Google Next 2022, the announcement was made that Google Data Studio has been rebranded as Looker Studio, which was a big surprise to many, especially if you found out by noticing a new name on the interface! 

For those that aren't familiar with Looker, it is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform which was acquired by Google in 2020. The rebranding of Data Studio as Looker Studio is good news as it shows a continued dedication by Google to provide robust tools for data management and analytics. Yesterday's conference was also filled with exciting conversations about machine learning and artificial intelligence, to continue to allow organizations to gain valuable insights from their data. 

The important thing for those in K-12 education to know is that Looker Studio is still free, and you can continue to use this awesome tool to create and view reports just as you always have. Looker Studio Pro ($) will provide improved asset management, new team collaboration capabilities, and access to technical support.

There's a lot to unpack after yesterday's announcement, and I'm sure there will be more developments in the coming months. But don't freak out! The main thing to know right now is that nothing has really changed for K-12 users of Data Studio, except a name and logo...and the knowledge that Google is continuing to support and innovate tools for creating data-driven experiences. So LOOK to the future and go forth and create!

P.S. While I know this blog is not the most active any more, I don't plan to change the URL or blog name to go with this name change, and probably won't go crazy updating old posts and things. Feel free to follow me on Twitter @tiltondata which is where I'm more active these days!

Report Passwords for Custom Data Delivery

Here's a fun way to use Parameters in Data Studio! You can use them to set up a variety of passwords for your Data Studio report, and even customize the data delivery for different passwords. 

Check out this example for more information. 

Calculated Fields: Figuring it out!

Calculated fields are a critical feature of Data Studio, and allow you to transform your data in a number of different ways. If you're at all familiar with functions and formulas in spreadsheets, you're more than halfway there to understanding calculated fields in Data Studio.

As of right now, Google Data Studio supports 82 different functions for calculated fields in seven different categories: 

• Aggregation (such as AVG to calculate an average)
• Arithmetic (such as ABS to return the absolute value of a number)
• Conditional (such as IF to return values based on conditional statements)
• Date (such as MONTH to return just the month of a date field)
• Geo (such as TOCITY to return a city name)
• Text (such as CONCAT to combine/concatenate text)
• Miscellaneous (such as HYPERLINK to create a clickable hyperlink in a table)

Calculated fields can be created either at the data source or the chart level in a Data Studio report. Data source calculated fields can be used over and over throughout any report that uses that data source, whereas chart-level calculated fields are created for use in a single graph, table, filter control or other element. more info

To create a data source calculated field, go to Resource > Manage added data sources, choose Edit for the data source to which you want to add the field, and then click + Add a Field in the upper right corner of the page.

To create a chart-specific calculated field in say, a selected table, look in the Data pane of the table's properties panel on the right, and click +Add dimension or +Add metric (depending on the kind of field you want to create.)

In both cases, you'll then need to give the field a name and then write a formula. Here are examples of calculated fields using two of my favorite functions:

• 
  Combining: Suppose your data source has fields for firstname and lastname, but you want to have a field that just gives a student's full name. You could use the CONCAT function to create a new field called Full Name. (Note that the example includes a comma and space between the two names.)
  

• 

  Transforming: Suppose you have a boolean field called IEP that is a 1 if a student has an IEP, and a 0 if they don't have an IEP, but you want the information to display more descriptively than just 0 or 1. You could use a CASE statement to create a new field called IEP Status.

        

• You could also use the IF function to do something similar.

For my spreadsheet friends: Please note that you don't need to type "=" before using any of these functions, like you do in Sheets or Excel (this took me some time to get used to!)

You might be asking, "If my data source is a Google Sheet, why wouldn't I just create these new fields as columns in my Sheet?" This is definitely another option, however, using calculated fields means you can do all the work on the Data Studio end without having to refresh the data source every time you add a new field, or "fill" Sheet formulas every time new rows are added to the spreadsheet.

Google has a simple tutorial to walk you through creating a few different types of calculated fields, if you want to try it out. 

Google Forms + Data Studio = A Match Made In Heaven!

Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I thought I'd highlight one of my favorite couples - Google Forms and Google Data Studio! 

Google Form data (saved in a Google Sheet) is a GREAT starting point for educators looking to get started creating a Google Data Studio report. Why? One main reason is that the structure of the data works well as a Data Studio data source, since it has just a single header row, no merged cells, no blank rows, and consistency in field values.

Here are a few tips for developing Google Forms to use with Data Studio:

• Use very short questions. Try using just 1-2 words in the Google Forms question field, then and putting the full details of the question in the description. These questions become your column headers in Sheets and thus your field names in Data Studio, and this makes them much more manageable.
  
• Avoid "Check all that apply" type questions. Try using a multiple choice grid type question (with yes/no answers) instead. This makes the data more compatible with filtering in Data Studio.
  
• Build a sort order into your responses. If the responses to a question have a particular order (like Daily, Weekly, Monthly), try including a sort order in the responses (1-Daily, 2-Weekly, 3-Monthly) so that when you sort in Data Studio they sort correctly. (Yes, you could do this with a calculated field in GDS too, but why make things harder if you don't have to?) Linear scale questions are a good option for this too, especially if you want to report on the average response number.
  
• Build your report first based on sample data. I will often build my report BEFORE sending out the Form, using the Form Responses tab with some rows of sample data (I usually try to add enough sample data that all possible answers are in the data set for each question.). I then remove my sample data once real data starts coming in.
• Take advantage of "live" updating. If you've built your Data Studio report, and the data continues to come in via the Form, the report will continue to update (automatically every 15 minutes). This is great for "leaderboard" type reports when you've built out the report ahead of time (see previous bullet)
  
• Capture email addresses. If your data source contains email addresses, you can use the Filter by Email feature to create customized reports. Or, you can use the email addresses as a unique identifier to pull in additional information on top of what's collected in the Form.

Here are some of my favorite examples of Data Studio projects that use Google Form data:

Surveys & Voting

• Social Media Use Survey

• Christmas Cookie Contest Leaderboard

Resource Collections

• SEL Resource Collection

• Digital Learning Tools Training Materials Collection

• Approved/Unapproved Resource List

Student Work

• Remote Learning Project Log

• Massachusetts Cities and Towns Research Project

• Student Reading Log

Do you have any other great examples? Please feel free to submit them to the K-12 Data Studio Report Collection!

Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day! ♥

Dynamic Dimension Parameters!

Have you ever wanted the user to have the ability to select which fields are utilized in a Data Studio chart? For example, suppose you wanted to look at the breakdown of a school's population by various dimensions, such as Special Education status. Gender, ELL status, High Needs status, Economically Disadvantaged status, and Title I status. In the past, you would have needed to create multiple charts, one for each dimension...making for a very busy report!

Parameters are a relatively new feature of Data Studio, and have a wide variety of uses. Essentially, they act like variables to make your report even more flexible and interactive. Here, I'm going to walk you through how parameters can be used to choose the dimension for a pie chart in a Data Studio report, allowing all the options above to be displayed in the space of a single chart. Take a look at the following simple example to see how this operates:

Cool, right? Here's how it's done.

The data source Sheet contains a list of students, plus columns for various demographics: Gender, Special Education Status, High Needs Status, Economically Disadvantaged Status, English Learner Status, and Title I Status.

I created a Parameter called Demographics (Resource menu, Manage added data sources, Edit, Add Parameter) and gave it a list of values with the same names as my fields.

Note that parameters appear as purple in the field list, whereas fields appear green.

Then, I created a calculated field (which I also called Demographics) which contained the parameter. I did this because I want to use it in a CASE statement, so it needs to be a field rather than a parameter.

Finally, I created a calculated field called Demographics Selection using the following CASE statement: 

To create the simple report linked above, I created a filter control (Fixed-size list) based on the Demographics parameter, and also a pie chart where Demographics Selection is the dimension and Record Count is the metric.

Interested in learning more about using parameters within Data Studio to dynamically change dimensions? Check out the following blog posts which are what helped me figure this out. How can you imagine using this feature? Let me know!

Resources:

• Dynamic Change of Dimension using Google Data Studio Parameter 
  by Mimoune Djouallah (@mim_djo)
• Google Data Studio secondary dimension like inside Google Analytics
  by Mehdi Oudjida (@wissi_analytics)
• Use Parameters to change Column Dimensions in Google Data Studio
  by Michael Howe-Ely (@michaelhoweely)

Happy Thankgiving!

There is always something to be #thankful for! Share your thanks with this fun #Thanksgiving dashboard using #GoogleDataStudio and #GoogleForms. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas in August?!?

Anyone reading this who works in a school district is probably running around like crazy preparing for the start to a very different school year. You may not have seen all the AMAZING updates to Data Studio which have appeared over the last two weeks, but have no fear, I'm here to fill you in! (Note that there are other new features but they aren't necessarily relevant to the use of Data Studio in K-12 education so I haven't mentioned them here.)

New Filter Controls

Previously, if you added a filter control to a Data Studio report, the default was a drop-down list, which could then be configured to (among other things) a fixed-size list. Now, fixed-size lists are one of six filter control types, with new options including a text input box (which you can configure to use EQUALS, CONTAINS, STARTS WITH, etc.), slider, and checkbox. These various options can be used to make your reports even simpler and easier to use! more info here

Parameters

I had a hard time wrapping my head around this one at first. Basically, it's a way to introduce a variable into your report that the user can change...which allowed me to create this cool algebraic Slope-Intercept explorer (which had been in my head a while but I had not figured out how to make it work with Data Studio.) The way this report works is that the data source is a range of x values, slope (m) and intercept (b) are parameters that the user can change, and then y is the result of a calculated field.

The report is just a scatter plot of x and y, which changes when the parameters are updated by the user. This is an example of a metric/numeric parameter - I am learning about some interesting ways to use dimensions/text as a parameter as well! more info here

Conditional Formatting in Pivot Tables

Previously, conditional formatting wasn't possible in Data Studio pivot tables, only regular tables. Now, pivot table conditional formatting options are single-color, so still limited, but it's certainly a huge improvement! more info here

Simplified CASE Statements for Calculated Fields

CASE statements are like IF/THEN statements in Data Studio that allow you to transform a field's values within a calculated field. In the past, you would write a CASE statement like this:

CASE

  WHEN field=value1 THEN result1

  WHEN field=value2 THEN result2

  WHEN field=value3 THEN result3

END

Now, you would write this:

CASE field

  WHEN value1 THEN result1

  WHEN value2 THEN result2

  WHEN value3 THEN result3

END

Honestly, isn't that big of a difference, and most of the time when I write a CASE statement I have to look up the syntax anyway, but it's definitely simpler to write statements this way. more info here

Filled Maps

There is a new option for "Filled Areas" within the Google Maps visualization. I updated the Massachusetts Cities and Towns report to show how this might work. Tip: if you want to sound super smart, use the word "chloropleth" instead of "filled area map." more info here

Embedded Data Sources

As you may know, until now, Data Studio reports and data sources were shown as separate items when on your Data Studio home page. If you wanted to share both a report and a data source with someone - you needed to share both items with the other person. Now, you have two options:

a) Create your data source first, then create a report and attach it to your data source. In this case, the data source is reusable, which means it's a separate item from the report. It can be used elsewhere but would need to be shared explicitly with someone who needs access. You'll still see the data source listed on your Data Studio home page.

OR

b) Create your report first, then create the data source from within the report. In this case, the data source is embedded, which means you can share the report and the data source all together. You won't see the data source listed separately on your Data Studio home page.

Just a note here that in either case, a person with view-only access to a report still does NOT have access to the data source, regardless of whether it's reusable or embedded! These really only come into play when you are sharing a report and data source for someone else to edit or copy. more info here

---------------

I look forward to seeing how YOU use these new features! (Particularly parameters which have TONS of potential!) As always, if you have new reports to share, please submit them for inclusion in the K-12 Data Studio Report Collection (recently added to Google's Data Studio Gallery) so we can all learn from each other. Best wishes for a smooth and healthy start to the school year!