Is Google Data Studio private?

Now 5 Ways

Unless youre a one (wo)man show at your company, theres going to come a time when you need to show people the data and what youve 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.

Sharing Settings

To navigate to the sharing settings, go to the share drop down and click on Invite People.

When the pop-up appears, youre going to have two options. Add people and Manage access. Googles 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 youd 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. Dont 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 doesnt show up particularly well on mobile. Its 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 doesnt 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, Im going to write up a guide on how to do it in WordPress and link it here. For now, Ill 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 youre using email delivery, you probably wont need this feature much. However, I occasionally use it when its 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 youd like a more detailed explanation, checkout Downloading a Google Data Studio Report.

Downloading The Underlying Data and Sending

Occasionally youre going to be asked for a slightly different look at the data set than whats in your current reports. If this is the case, the easiest option is to download the underlying data and tweak it. Its much faster than creating a new report for an ad hoc request.

This time, go to the graph or charts right hand corner and click on the three dot drop down and click download.