Data Studio runs in the browser, so you can use it on both Windows and Mac without any installation. Just head to datastudio.google.com to get started.
Login to your Orca Scan account, select the sheet that you want to connect to Data Studio and head to the Integrations settings.
Enable “Allow public URL access” and copy the Live Data URL to your clipboard. You’re going to add this URL to a Google Sheet, which will be used as the data source for Data Studio to query your Orca Scan data.
As an additional confirmation check, you must save the integration changes.
Now, let’s head over to Google Sheets…
When connecting directly to Data Studio, you can only refresh the data every 12 hours. So, we’re going to set up a Google Sheet as the data source we can refresh every 15 minutes.
Once you’ve got an empty Google Sheet, place the cursor in the A1 cell and add the =IMPORTDATA
formula.
Now add the Live Data URL from Orca Scan within the brackets =IMPORTDATA("replace-with-your-orca-sheet-url-here.csv"
).
Important: be sure to include the quotation marks!
Once your data is loaded into the sheet you can now use it as the data source to build your reports in Data Studio.
Next, over to Data Studio…
Reports are built around data sources, so you won’t see any editor controls or menus until you add one. You can add your Google Sheet in these 4 steps:
Here’s the full guide to creating data sources.
You can now build reports. Start by adding a new blank report.
Then select your new Data Source in the Data Source Picker on the right, and add your first chart from the Add a chart option in the toolbar.
In the example above, we have used a GPS location map and a simple Pie chart. For a more in-depth guide on creating reports, read this Tutorial: Create a new report.
You can refresh the cache at any time by viewing or editing the report and clicking Refresh data, but you can also control how often to run the refresh.
By using Google Sheets as the data source, you can set that to every 15 minutes.
It happens at the Data Source level, so you need to Edit the data source, and in the toolbar at the top, set the Data freshness.
We’re always happy to help, chat with us live or drop us an email.
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