Hands On With Google Data Studio

CHAPTER 8Getting Personal

As a data citizen, you have access to much more than just business information. In this chapter and the next, we'll look at other areas where you can apply Data Studio beyond strictly business uses. This chapter will look at more personal applications, and Chapter 9, “Going Public,” will cover community data sources.

What do I mean when I speak of personal applications? I think of these as Data Studio applications that promote better self‐understanding, personal growth, or simply recreation. Since you need data to do data visualization, we'll look at these applications based on how the data is generated—data created directly by you, data curated by you, and data generated for you.

We'll take a look at examples in each of these areas and I’ll show you how you can take control of your own data and organize and visualize it for your own purposes. Finally, I'll show you a Data Studio application that uses all three methods of data collection.

Creating Your Own Data

These days, we use a lot of applications to help us track and organize our personal data. Although these applications free us from having to measure and log things in which we are interested, they are often designed to provide information to the service provider rather than the individual. In some cases, you can retrieve your personal information, as we did in the previous checking account examples in Chapter 2, “Cooking with Google Data Studio”.

You also have the option to collect and store ...