Google Data Studio Limitation on Percentage of Total and How to Overcome it
The first time I tried Tableau, I almost immediately fall in love with it! (No, you’re not in the wrong post). It is a really good data visualization tools and easy to use too! Just drag and drop and there you go!
But the sad thing is, it is expensive. You can use Tableau Public, but you can’t really use it for your company. So, one of the solutions is to use a free tool, which one of them is Google Data Studio.
Google Data Studio is a free online tool for converting data into an informative dashboard. It has a lot of visualization and relatively easy to use (although not as easy as tableau).
These past months I’ve been using it for the purpose of work and I found some limitation from Google Data Studio (which irritate me but hey, it’s free! what do you expect?). I found that we have to use some ‘trick’ to make things work.
One of the limitations that makes me sigh is Percentage of Total.
Yes. Google Data Studio cannot automatically make a percentage of a total (which makes me frustrated at first).
For example, you wanted to know the percentage of deaths because of COVID from 4 countries: United States, Brazil, India, and Mexico.
There is an option for a Comparison Calculation -> Percent of Total
But when you click it, you can see that the result is not what you wanted.
You may have wanted a percentage of each countries death in each month, but what you get is a percentage of overall data.
So, how you deal with this?
- Go to Resource and click the Manage added data sources
2. Click edit on the data source
3. and then, duplicate the date!
In this case, date is the base of the percentage, you can duplicate the metrics that you are using as the base of percentage. It can be anything!
4. Set the copy of the date as a Date-Month
5. Blend the data!
Click on the + Blend data and add your data source as the new data source
Use the copy of the date as the join keys and add the following Row in dimensions!
Row as dimensions, Value as the Metrics, and the Columns as the Join keys!
Don’t forget to name the death in month-year as the death-month-year (so you can know the difference)
6. Add a new metrics!
Create a new field and just sums up the death metrics and the death metrics (of the month)
and here you go!
Now you can get the percentage of total per month!
How does it work?
Basically, we just sums up the date each month and then
That’s it from me! See you next week for more article and post. Stay healthy and safe!
P.S This is not my best work but I am still learning and I’m on my way there! This is one of the challenges that I do to write one article per week. Hopefully it can help you guys!
