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Dahlgren Memorial Library

Creating Dashboards with Google Data Studio

Use this guide to follow along during DML's Google Data Studio Workshop

Configure Map

Delete the table on the report page -- On the top left, click Add a chart -- Under Google Maps, click Filled map.

The map won't display yet. You'll need to add the field that uniquely identifies each location first. 

  1. On the right, under Location, click "Invalid dimension," then choose geo_id.
    1. This field uniquely identifies each census tract.
  2. Under Geospatial field, click Add metric, then choose tract_geom.
    1. This field contains the BigQuery GEOGRAPHY data that defines the polygons we want to display.

The map should look like this:

initial DC map

Style the Map

The map's default color metric is Record Count. Let’s choose a more interesting metric.configure fields appearance

On the right, under Color metric, choose percent_income_spent_on_rent. You could drag over any other metric of interest, such as median_income or median_rent if you want to explore that data instead.

You can also provide viewers with a better tooltip by changing the Tooltip dimension.

  1. In the top right, click Edit.
  2. Select the map.
  3. On the right, under Tooltip, choose lsad_name.
    1. This field contains the human-readable census tract name

 

 You can customize the appearance of the map in the STYLE tab. For example, you could increase the fill opacity to 80% and change the color gradient from blue to red. This gives us our final DC map! Now we can add a pages to the dashboard to show data for Virginia and Maryland. 

 

final DC Map