These are the Top 3 Features I Want from Data Studio in 2020
What’s becoming an annual tradition (see 2017, 2019), the list below encompasses the top 3 features I want from Google Data Studio in 2020. As a reminder, this list comes from a place of love — Data Studio has become my tool-of-choice over the past few years, and these are all improvements that would make it that much easier to recommend.
1. Detailed Visualization Controls
While Google has made strides in this space over the past year with additions like custom visuals, conditional formatting, and label fine-tuning, Data Studio is still behind other platforms in this area. I think this statement I made last year still holds true: I would prefer to see a concerted effort from the Data Studio team to really nail down the basics (data labels, color by metric, size by metric, axis padding, individual axis toggles, etc.) before offloading the work onto the community [via custom visuals].
“…data labels, color by metric, size by metric, axis padding, individual axis toggles, etc.”
2. Proper Data Blending
Sadly, my hopes from 2019 have not been answered. When it comes to data blending, I would still love to see it move to a dedicated space in the dataset interface so that 1) I can do all of my data blending before I even start messing around with visualizations, and 2) I can save/reuse/share/manage my blended datasets like any other dataset in Data Studio. This is how most tools are setup and it’s more logical than trying to do everything in the dashboarding interface. While we’re on the topic, blended data calculations need to be updated. As of today, you can technically create a blended data calc, but it’s a mess and it doesn’t scale.
“I would still love to see [data blending] move to a dedicated space…”
3. Functions, Parameters, and Grouping
Keeping with the theme here, my third feature request is identical to 2019. The team at Google made their first updates to the function library last year, but Data Studio has a long way to go to catch up to some of the hard-to-live-without functions available on other platforms (e.g. FIXED, SUMX, RANK). Related to functions, parameters and grouping are two other features that have been noticeably absent since 2016. Tableau has the best implementation of parameters and grouping I’ve used to date, so hopefully Data Studio can copy what Tableau has already done.
“Data Studio has a long way to go to catch up to some of the hard-to-live-without functions available on other platforms”
What do you think? Are there any features that you’ve been waiting to see implemented in Data Studio? Feel free to get in touch.
