Now 5 Ways…
Unless you’re a one (wo)man show at your company, there’s going to come a time when you need to show people the data and what you’ve been working on. Luckily, Google has made it easy. Below are 4 ways to share your data studio dashboards with internal partners, clients, or your boss. Before we do that, we have to talk about sharing settings.
Also, if you need a refresher on Data Studio, checkout the basics of Google Data Studio.
Table of Contents
Sharing Settings
To navigate to the sharing settings, go to the share drop down and click on “Invite People”.
When the pop-up appears, you’re going to have two options. Add people and Manage access. Google’s default under Manage access is to have only specific people accessing your reports. If you want more access control and decide to keep that setting, you have to manually add people under “Add people”.
If you’d like a little more freedom for people to share your report, change the setting to “Anyone with the link can view”.
Do not change it to “Anyone with the link can edit”. You risk someone less familiar with Data Studio accidentally changing a comparison range or filter without you noticing.
If you need to add editors, do that under “Add people” and change the drop down to “Edit”. They will then show up under “Manage access”.
Sharing a Report Link
The first way to share a report is to share a link with a group of people. Don’t forget to check or change your sharing settings before doing this.
Go to “Share” and “Get report link” and “Copy link”. You can then send that link via email, text, skype, or any other method.
The benefit of using this method is that it allows users to use the drop downs/filter controls as opposed to a PDF.
Scheduling an Email Delivery
Data Studio doesn’t show up particularly well on mobile. It’s still better than Tableau, but not perfect. When an email is sent out, it includes a link to the original report along with an attached PDF.
Scheduling an email delivery allows you to first automate sending out report links. Because god forbid someone actually bookmarks what you sent them… And second, the fact that a PDF is attached is a lifesaver. Since it doesn’t show up well on mobile, a PDF is the perfect compromise between usefulness on mobile and desktop.
First go to the drop-down next to “Share” and click on “Schedule email delivery”. Next, add the email addresses of the people you want delivered to. Then at what frequency.
Embedding a Report in a Website
The process to embed a report in a website is a little bit more complicated. In the future, I’m going to write up a guide on how to do it in WordPress and link it here. For now, I’ll just show you how to get the iframe or URL to do the actual embedding.
Go to “Share” and “Embed report” and check “Enable embedding”. From there, grab the iframe or URL and be on your way.
Downloading and Sending a PDF
If you’re using email delivery, you probably won’t need this feature much. However, I occasionally use it when it’s easier than digging through old emails to find the report I want.
Just like before, go to “Share” and “Download report” and then click “Download”. If you’d like a more detailed explanation, checkout Downloading a Google Data Studio Report.
Downloading The Underlying Data and Sending
Occasionally you’re going to be asked for a slightly different look at the data set than what’s in your current reports. If this is the case, the easiest option is to download the underlying data and tweak it. It’s much faster than creating a new report for an ad hoc request.
This time, go to the graph or chart’s right hand corner and click on the three dot drop down and click download.