Hey Lee Schlesinger, thanks for sharing your tutorials. I had a read through them and particularly liked how you covered the data source creation in DataStudio.

I would agree that sometimes DataStudio can seem clunky and I think one of the big reasons is that you need to ‘hack’ the more complex things which aren’t in-built as they are in Tableau. Thankfully someone has usually done it before on the forums and you can quickly replicate. Again, I like this approach of adding what you need vs. sifting through hundreds of features for what you need, but I think that’s just preference.

You said “if you juts run simple reports … DataStudio should be fine” and I totally agree here. What I’ll add, is that in my experience working with business cases, 80% of the reports that end users actually need are simple reports. When making the switch from Tableau to DataStudio by working with my colleagues we were able to remove a lot of the complex reports that we thought we needed but weren’t really being used effectively. Similarly, I think that holds true for many organisations. We sometimes build complex reports and can get lost in the data, when some good data processing at the start with a simple, concise dashboard can have greater impact.

Following on from this, I believe the tool which can handle the simple cases most gracefully is the best BI tool to use across the company. Rather than choose something which can handle every type of report (Tableau), I opt for the one that can do the majority of the reports in the best way (DataStudio) — this way I’m left with 80% of my users loving the way they can create reports and view their data and the 20% being dealt with workarounds or other tools (while it’s not a BI tool, we use Jupyter Notebooks for more complex analyses and reporting as it is more powerful than Tableau). After all, BI tools are only as powerful as they are useful for the end user.