All data sitting in BigQuery, is great if you're an analyst who's exploring for insights with SQL. But it's often not enough for your stakeholders. They want to see and interact with your data in a more intuitive and visual way. Data visualization is a powerful tool to let you explore your data also before presenting your results. Speaking of exploration, a new and popular way to explore your datasets is available right within BigQuery. After you execute a query, you could explore in Data Studio to immediately start creating visuals or explore as part of building a dashboard. Now, here's an example of an actual Data Studio report. They don't have to understand the numbers. But just on the surface, Now what do you think this report is trying to do? In this case, it was the ad performance for the 2016 Olympic games that were broadcasted on NBC. The role of your report should be to highlight the key insights that your audience cares about. Don't show them everything, focus and filter their attention to just what those data points or those insights that they need to be seeing right then. Telling a good story with your data on your dashboard is critical because your users are likely not going to care about that amazing pipeline you just built, if the output of the dashboard is ugly and hard to use. Take it from experience. Data Studio comes with pre-built templates like this one that monitors your GCP Billing in a dashboard. You can even connect this one to your own GCP account to monitor your own spending and do some fun analysis like track incoming BigQuery jobs and the amount of data that those queries are processing. Here is a quick walk-through of the Data Studio UI. Now keep in mind that the team is continuously updating the product, so refer to their documentation as a link for those best examples in additional practices. The Data Studio homepage shows the dashboards and the data sources that you have access to. It's an important distinction between the two. Connected data sources can feed into dashboards but just because somebody has access to your dashboard, doesn't mean they automatically are granted permission to view the underlying data that's presented, because that could be controlled in BigQuery or elsewhere in your GCP project. Anyway, there are two ways to create a new report from scratch: from the templates panel up at the top, or from the button in the lower right-hand corner. The first thing you need to do is tell Data Studio where your data is coming from. That again is known as the data source. A Data Studio report can have any number of data sources but we'll just start with one. The data source picker shows all the data sources that you have access to. Note that you can have any or all of these data sources in a single Data Studio report. Since Data Studio reports and datasets can be shared, you should be aware of the ramifications of adding a new data source. When you add a data source to a report, other people who can view the report, can potentially see all the data in that data source if you share that data source with them. Anyone who can edit the report can also use all the fields from any added data sources to create new charts with them. You can click "Add to Report" to connect the data source and then you're ready to start visualizing.
