I decided to take a break from machine learning and instead poke at Google Data Studio. GDS is a platform for building simple dashboards for data visualization. So it comes with a bunch of built-in graphs for you to plop wherever on a page, and you can quickly change what data is display or restrictions on it.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t had much use for building slick looking dashboards. I find creating one graphic with the key data is more than enough to get an important idea across. But, if I were creating lots of general graphs, Google Data Studio makes it easy and pretty. It’s got a reasonable set of basic graphs (bar scatter, time series, globe, etc) and makes filtering pretty simple. Plus, it includes little interactions like giving you data point details when you hover over it. So it’s meant for you to create a dashboard and share with whoever your client is.

So, I don’t think I’ll be using Google Data Studio for daily data science, but for compiling summary statistics, it’s pretty nice. If you serve a corporate overlord that wants nice looking charts, this is a great digital solution to get your points across without spending too much time fiddling.