As of this week, you can set styles globally for all the dimensions and metrics of a given chart. The feature applies to table charts, line & combo charts, and time series.
A welcome micro-feature that makes us a little more productive.
Previous released features
The features added this summer ☀️ follow the same spirit of minor but welcome improvements:
Rotation for text, shape, and image elements
Search for settings in the properties panel (super handy, especially in the Style tab)
Full-screen mode for charts from the chart header (sadly, no full-window mode)
Borders on bubble charts
Centered labels on stacked bar charts
Cadence of Data Studio releases
Beyond how secondary these additions are, I wondered what Data Studio's current release velocity actually looks like. The numbers I pulled from the public release notes didn't contradict my gut feeling: fewer public releases, fewer features overall, and mostly minor ones, as we just saw.
You could tell me these are only the public releases. And you'd be right: they don't reflect the internal development velocity. But public releases are also a way for a vendor to send positive signals, and to turn every new thing into content for that channel. That's how I read them, of course.
What we would need from Data Studio
Five months after Data Studio was repositioned as a "Data Hub", the report-building interface would need a complete overhaul to meet today's needs and challenges:
An editing interface for humans, but above all for agents 🤖
A report-reading interface for both of those types of data consumers
Ways to extend the tool's built-in capabilities
…All within a free product carrying significant technical legacy, at a time when competition keeps multiplying, each competitor addressing in its own way a usage segment that until now was often covered by a single tool.
♠️ The flop has been dealt, the turn too... And for now, we don't know if it's a check-raise or a call-then-fold. Either way, I can't wait to see the river and what cards are in hand. All while playing at other tables.
To be continued.
Besides that, Measure Summit is coming up!
I'm happy and honoured to join Measure Summit for the very first time, as a speaker.
For this talk, I've decided to take apart a few of today's overly radical takes, the ones our restless era keeps rewarding, the ones that tell you to bury what still works in the name of whatever's new. My way of being radical in my convictions without being radical in the solutions they call for.
I will explain why I think Conversational Analytics Won't Kill Your Dashboards, But It Might Bury What Matters.
Join us to watch my talk, but above all, to take advantage of online conferences led by many renowned speakers!
