The Google Analytics team just announced Data Studio: their free, new, Data Visualization Product. Read their post for more details, but since I just got a new load of reddit comments from /u/Stuck_in_the_Matrix loaded in BigQuery, I’m eager to show you how to connect both.

The first surprise with Data Studio: It’s really easy to connect it to BigQuery:

Add a data source, choose BigQuery. To work with open data that others have shared, choose “shared projects”. Try adding mine, to find reddit comments: ‘fh-bigquery’. Select the dataset and table you want to work with.

4. If this is your first time using BigQuery, you might need to create a new “billing project”. Don’t worry, just create a GCP account and don’t worry about billing (yet): BigQuery gives you a free terabyte for querying every month, no credit card required. Then come back to Data Studio to complete the previous steps.

5. Note that when querying and sharing, this will be the project being billed for the underlying BigQuery queries.

Data Studio now displays your chosen table columns (it could have been a query too), and allows you to choose the credentials to use when sharing the report (yes, you can share). You can choose either your credentials (will allow you to share the reports with anyone) or have the report ask for the viewer credentials (to keep the underlying data viewable only by authorized parties).

And now comes the fun part: Start dragging and dropping to create visualizations and interactive reports:

To put all of this together, I created a visualization to compare how many comments for Trump/Sanders/Clinton got gold on reddit during April 2016. As shown in the following video, it’s super easy to share the results.

The shareable report: https://datastudio.google.com/open/0ByGAKP3QmCjLWFpxU1R4WU9WR0k

For more stories like this, follow me on twitter.com/felipehoffa, or subscribe to reddit.com/r/bigquery.

PS: Now globally available!