Top 3 Features Coming to Google Data Studio in 2020/2021
By: Pat Strickler
Over the past 3 years (2017, 2019, 2020), I have been writing open letters to the Google Data Studio development team with feature requests, and it appears that some of my wishes have been granted. During a recent community livestream, the lid was lifted on the product roadmap for the rest of the year and beyond. Here are the top 3 features that I’m looking forward to the most.
#1: Grouping and Binning
Something that is a staple in tools like Tableau and Power BI, Data Studio has been sorely missing Grouping and Binning features since it launched. I called these out way back in 2017, but it appears that these are both on the roadmap for H2 2020+ (hopefully sooner rather than later).
#2 Proper Date/Time Functions
Another pain-point that appears to be getting an upgrade soon, Date/Time Functions are on the roadmap for H1 2020. One function in particular that stands out is CURRENT_DATETIME. I could see this being very useful for analysts who want to calculate ‘amount since today’ values.
I’ll also mention here that other function improvements are on the roadmap. CASE is specifically mentioned as coming soon, which is definitely appreciated, but a generic ‘Additional Functions’ line was also included in the presentation. Hopefully this means more complex functions are also on the way.
#3 Improved Performance
One thing that always grinds a dashboard experience to a halt is the data refresh experience. For being completely cloud hosted, I think Data Studio does a decent job of handling load and refresh times, but there is always room for improvement. My hope is that some time is spent thinking about how blending can be improved, but, unfortunately, that was not specifically called out on the roadmap.
Those are the top 3 features I’m most looking forward to from the Google Data Studio team in 2020/2021. Let me know down in the comments which features you are looking forward to the most.
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