Google Sheets is the spreadsheet app available on Google Workspace, or standalone, with a free plan for personal use and accessible via mobile apps for iOS and Android.
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Looker Studio
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
I enjoy the ease of access and sharing information with anyone, google sheets is great for that. You can easily send a link in an email or text message which makes it easier than other programs because you have to purchase separately if their software doesn't come included at …
Google Data Studio integrates data into visually appealing reports and can constantly update based on the linked data source (i.e., Google Analytics), a feature that neither of the platforms listed can do. However, sometimes Google Data Studio can't generate graphs based on my …
Google Sheets is a great tool mostly for people in the finance department such as accountants who have to analyze hundreds of transactions. The software makes it easy to organize data and handle some analysis. Also, when it comes to data presentation, Google Sheets offers some of the best features. However, this is not to sat people outside the finance docket cannot benefit from this software. It is a great tool to have when handling data.
Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
The major reason I use Google Sheets over Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers is for its ability to allow multiple users to access and work on the same spreadsheet at once. This is incredibly more efficient and effective than updating and sending copies upon copies of the same Excel or Numbers spreadsheet back and forth as email attachments.
Google Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and Tableau. While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.