The Ultimate Guide: Google Sheets to Google Data Studio

What is Google Sheets and Google Data Studio?

Google Sheets is a powerful tool for any activity that involves data recording and analysis. It is a free, cloud-based spreadsheet application. This means that you can open it on a web browser window just like a regular webpage and get the functionality of a spreadsheet application for doing data analysis. However, the Google spreadsheet alone is not enough. Most marketers, analysts, and website owners transfer data from Google Sheets to Google Data Studio because it provides a way to perform further analysis on the data and visualize it. 

This will give you an opportunity to extract more insights from the data. Google Data Studio is an online tool that is used to convert data into customizable reports and dashboards. It helps users easily identify trends in data, analyze it and generate insights from it. You can connect Google Sheets to Google Data Studio and pull in your data for further analysis. 

In this article, you will learn the steps to connect Google Sheets to Google Data Studio. 

Organize the Google Sheet

You can create and edit Google Sheets for free. To access Google Sheets, follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Open this link on your web browser.

You will be taken to the following page.

Step 2: Scroll downwards on the page to the “Get a head start with templates” section. 

You will see the “Go to Google Sheets” button on the top right corner of the window. Click on the button. 

Step 3: You will then be prompted to log into your account. Use your Google/Gmail credentials to log in. You will be taken to the Google Sheets Home screen.

The window will show you samples of Google Sheets. 

These samples should give you an idea of how a Google Sheet looks like and the type of information that you can include in your Google Sheet. 

All the spreadsheets that you have created are also shown on the window. For each spreadsheet, you are given the name, the owner, and when it was created or last modified. 

To create a new Google Sheet, simply click the “ + Blank” button which is shown below.

 You will be taken to a blank spreadsheet. 

Give the spreadsheet a title of choice, for example, myspreadsheet. 

You can now add data to your spreadsheet. 

Connect Google Sheet

If you work with data, you know the importance of presenting the right metrics in a concise, clear, and visually attractive manner. It’s hard for anyone to work with cluttered Excel sheets. 

Although you can use the dashboards provided by Google Analytics, they are not visually appealing. If you have to combine data from multiple sources, your reports will become more complicated. 

A spreadsheet cannot help you in such a scenario. That’s why Google developed Data Studio, a tool for data visualization and creating beautiful and shareable reports. 

Some of the visualizations that you can use in Data Studio include pie charts, bar charts, and time series. One of the greatest features of Google Data Studio is the ability to combine data from multiple sources into one report. 

There are a number of data sources that cannot be connected directly to the Data studio. In such scenarios, you can first move the data to Google Sheets, then into Data Studio. 

Basically, any data that you upload on Google Sheets can be pulled into Data Studio. With Data Studio, multiple users can view a report and edit it simultaneously. 

Sharing of reports is very simple as you only have to click the “Share” button, copy the report link and send it to the members. You can also schedule the report to be delivered automatically. 

You can log into your Data Studio account here.

The page shows a number of sample reports that have been generated using Data Studio. 

You can view the reports and get a general idea of how Data Studio reports look like and the kind of information that you should add into your reports. 

Anytime that you want to create a new report, you simply have to click the “+ Blank Report” button as shown below.

Note that reports are created from data, hence, you will have to add data to Data Studio in order to generate reports. 

The “Data sources” section shows all the data that you have added into Data Studio. 

As you can see in the above image, the page is organized into three columns. 

• The first column shows the name of the data. 
• The second column shows the owner of the data. 
• The third column shows the last time the data was opened. 

The last two columns have options presented using a dropdown box. 

Anytime that you need to add new data to Data Studio, just click the “+ CREATE” button located on the top left corner of the window. 

If you click the “Explorer” button, you will see the list of explorers in your Data Studio account. 

You can filter the reports and the data sources using the navigation pane on the left. 

For example, to see the reports that have been shared with you, click the “Reports” button and choose “Shared with me” option from the left navigation page. 

To see the reports that you have created or the ones that you own, click the “Reports” button and choose the “Owned by me” option from the navigation pane on the left. 

To see all the reports that have been trashed, click the “Reports” button and choose the “Trash” option from the navigation pane on the left. 

The data sources can also be filtered in the same way. 

Step by Step Procedure

You must connect Google Sheets to Google Data Studio, in order to move your data.

The connection of Google Sheets to Google Data Studio can be done by following the below steps.

Step 1: Log into your Data Studio account. 

Step 2: Click the “+ CREATE” button located on the top left corner of the window.

Step 3: On the small window that pops up, choose “Data source”. 

Step 4: You will be taken to a page that shows connectors to different data sources. Choose “Google Sheets”. You can also search for it using the search bar provided at the top. 

Step 5: Select the spreadsheet of your choice, and then the worksheet. 

Step 6: Click the “CONNECT” button located on the top right corner of the window. 

Congrats! You will have established a connection from Google Sheets to Google Data Studio. 

Limitations

Although you can connect Google Sheets to Google Data Studio, there is no simple way to pull real-time data from Google Sheets to Google Data Studio. 

You have to use a Google App Script and the Google Analytics real-time API. This means that you must have some scripting knowledge. If you are not a programmer, this will be a great challenge for you. 

Using Hevo

A very good solution to the above limitations is Hevo. 

Hevo is a data integration tool which does not require you to code! Hevo can help you to pull in data from any source, including Google Sheets, to your warehouse in real-time. 

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Now you can transfer data from Google Sheets to your target Destination for Free using Hevo!

Conclusion

This is what you’ve done in this article.

• You have learned how to use Google Sheets. 
• You’ve learned how to use Google Data Studio. 
• You’ve learned how to connect Google Sheets to Google Data Studio. 

You can now transfer data from sources like Google Sheets to your target destination for Free using Hevo! Tell us what you think about connecting Google Sheets to Google Data Studio in the comments. We would love to hear from you!

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