Engine Works

AlexG · ‎12-14-2023

Welcome to our tutorial series for the new Designer Cloud + Looker Studio integration! Today, we’re sharing a guide to the Google Sheets connector and other new connector types available. For a guide on the “Upload Excel & Prep Data” connector, check out Part 1.

In case you missed it, a free version of Designer Cloud is now natively integrated with Looker Studio, which means it just got easier to get from data source to dashboard. Looker Studio customers can access Designer Cloud from within Looker Studio and access a subset of Designer Cloud’s connectors.

Here’s how to prepare your Google Sheets data in Designer Cloud.

Step 1: Open Looker Studio and find the Google Sheets connector

First, open Looker Studio and select “Data source” under the Create menu.

Scroll down to Partner Connectors and find the Alteryx connector for “Prep Google Sheets Data.”

Authorize access to connect to your data. Then, you’ll use SSO to sign into your Alteryx account – or if you’re a Looker user who’s new to Alteryx, create a free trial of the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform.

Step 2: Connect to Your Google Sheets Data

It’s time to get our data. The Create Google Sheets Connection button takes you to a window where you’ll name the connection and sign into your Google account.

Now that you’ve established your connection, you can see a list of the Google Sheets in your Google account appear. Choose the sheet, or multiple sheets, you want to import.

For this example, I want to prepare data for a visualization of the top artists in 2023 (can you guess who it will be? I have my suspicions). So I’ll import a Google Sheet with my dataset of the most streamed Spotify songs in 2023.

When you hit Continue, you’ll land in the Data tab of the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform interface. This is where you can view the datasets you have access to.

Here we can see our Spotify dataset, and we can click the Use in Workflow button to start preparing the data in Designer Cloud.

Step 3: Prepare Your Google Sheets Dataset in Designer Cloud

Here we are in the Designer Cloud canvas! The dataset is already input. We can start dragging and dropping in more tools to prepare, transform and explore the data.

You’ve got 50+ tools to choose from on the menu. Let’s start by dragging the Data Cleansing tool onto the canvas. I also want to change some data types from string to float, like the number of streams, so I’ll add in a Select tool.

As you build your workflow, you’ve probably noticed the Interactive Results Grid at the bottom. This is where you can investigate your data and preview the transformations as you go, without needing to run the entire workflow. And if you need suggestions, you can get AI-powered recommendations of different transformations to perform on the dataset.

Today we’ll keep this workflow simple and get right to the question at hand: Who was the top artist? We’ll use the Summarize tool to group artists by number of hit songs. And one Sort tool later, we have our answer.

Taylor Swift! Color me shocked (not). I mean, you don’t get to be TIME’s Person of the Year without pulling something off like 34 top-streamed songs in one year. But it would be nice to see some rock songs in there for once. I love SZA as much as the next gal, but where did the bands go?!

Unsolicited music opinions aside, our dataset is ready for visualization in Looker Studio. We’re going to output Taylor, The Weeknd, SZA and their fellow top-streamed artists by dropping in an Output tool and running the workflow with the Run Job button.

As always, if you get stuck, you can visit the Designer Cloud discussion forum, take an interactive lesson, or see our documentation.

Step 4: Visualize in Looker Studio

Back in Looker Studio, we can now select the prepared dataset from a drop-down menu and connect to that dataset.

From there, you can create a report from your dataset or explore the data further.

And now we can see visually that Taylor Swift is truly operating on her own level.

Using another data source

Not using Google Sheets or Excel? We’ve got more options ready to go! We’re building connectors for Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, OneDrive, and Sharepoint that you can use in a similar way with Looker Studio. The Connectors page in the freemium version of Designer Cloud will show you these options.

The new Looker Studio + Designer Cloud integration makes it simple and effective to get your data from the source, to prep, to visual, all in one go. Keep checking back for more updates!

Ready to get started? Here are some helpful resources: